Processing Data

Book excerpt: This volume highlights the theory that decisions made during the design of a data collection instrument influence the kind of data and the format of the data that are available for analysis. Opening with a discussion on the selection of the data collection technique(s) and how this impacts on data processing and the data for later analysis, the book covers key issues such as: should you create your own instrument for a questionnaire? how do you test a questionnaire? what are the characteristics of good data processing? how to deal with missing data? how to scale an evaluation and create subfiles for analysis? In addition, each major section concludes with examples and when appropriate, directs the reader to commonly available computer software that can aid in data processing.