Statistics - How to Create a Data Set and Formulate Research Questions
1. What is the topic of your data?
2. Is it numeric - i.e. quantitative or narrative (ethnographic) - qualitative?
3. What research questions do you want to answer from your data?
Who
What
Where
When
Why
How
4. Which variables do you want to use to test your hypothesis?
5. What is the unit of analysis?
Human Study Subjects or Cases
States
Countries
6. What are your measures - variables - available in the data set to answer your question(s)?
7. Where is the sample drawn from? (country? state? county? school? hospital?...etc.).
8. When were the data collected? (year?).
9. Why is this research important? (theoretical basis?). Why is this problem worth studying?
10. How are the phenomenon related? How are the associations measured? What are the variables? Define?
11. Is the data primary (collected by you) or secondary (collected by someone else)?
12. What type of methods would you apply to these data?