Data Analysis Tutorial

Session 2: Choosing Your Data Analysis Technique

Overview

Once you’ve decided on your research questions, you’ll be able to determine how you’ll collect the data and analyze it to answer your research questions.

At this point, you may or may not have your research questions written; nonetheless, you can use these tutorials to think about what you might study and how you might analyze the data to answer your questions.

Before we dig into the tutorial materials, be sure to review the following:

Read Bartley & Bowen's Basics of Data Literacy Chapters 1-5.
Review The Graph Choice Chart.
Review the Choosing Your Data Analysis table. This table is how we've structured the remaining tutorials; breaking the content into comparison and descriptive methods.

In the rest of this tutorial, we’ll explore the different data analysis techniques you can use for your capstone project, focused first on comparison methods (session 2) and then descriptive methods (session 3). Before we dig into the comparison methods, let's chat for a minute about the similarities and differences between comparison methods and descriptive methods.

Comparison Methods

Now that you’ve reviewed the Choosing Your Data Analysis table (keep this one open!) and The Graph Choice Chart, choose 3 or more techniques within the Comparison Methods interactive to explore (embedded below). If you know what you'll be studying, we recommend that you explore data analysis techniques that align with what you might implement during your capstone project. Additionally, before you get started, check your MSSE course to see if you've been assigned any additional tasks by your instructor for Session 2.

For each data analysis technique, you'll see the following: