Five Free Resources to Help You 'Love Your Data'
In support of Love Your Data Week (February 13-17), here are five freely available resources from SAGE Research Methods, SAGE Publishing’s methods library of books, reference works, journal articles, case studies, data sets, and a video collection on research methods, statistics, and evaluation.The below articles and videos deal with common issues such as archiving data, cleaning and working with data sets, and the pros and cons of using register data in scientific research. Read on to see these resources, which are freely accessible all week long!
Is there such thing as perfect survey data? Register data comes close – rich, without bias, complete, longitudinal – but doesn’t come without its pitfalls. In this research method case study, Professor Dimitri Mortelmans and Inge Pasteels discuss the pros and cons of register data for scientific research.
Accompany Associate Director Louise Corti through a tour of the UK Data Archive, a center that curates high-quality research data for analysis and reuse, and learn more about the types of data they hold, the steps to collect it, and what’s involved in making it widely available to the research community.
Read how a group of researchers investigated the audience’s perspective on American hit show Mad Men, by looking at commentary from 11 Mad Men fan websites. Find out how they approached this Big Data project, and how key decisions were made about selecting, managing, and analyzing the big data set they compiled.
In this research method case study, Senior Lecturer Margaret Hurley, from the University of Central Lancashire, shares her experiences creating and cleaning her own data set as part of a research project on the medical history of the UK Cotton Workers’ Cohort: from the time it took to error-detecting techniques. She also covers topics about the significance and importance of this step for future research publications.
Watch Fiona Courage and Jessica Scantlebury describe their work with the Mass Observation Archive, which contains data on British public life. They send out directives and collect the observations of ordinary people, as well as preserving and cataloging materials. They also explain how best to start a career in archives.Enjoyed these resources? MethodSpace will be offering special stories and content all this week. And you can keep up-to-date with SAGE’s our latest activities by following @SAGE_News, @SAGElibrarynews and #SAGEDataWiz. And join the data conversation on social media by using the official Love Your Data Week hashtags #LYD17 and #loveyourdata.