13.4.10: Data as Sources
Data as Sources Using data as sources can help with all of your research project’s information needs:
- Learn more background information.
- Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.)
- Convince your audience that your answer is correct. (Data often give you ecidence that your answer that your answer is correct. (Data often give you evidence that your answer to your research question is correct or at least a reasonable answer.)
- Describe the situation surrounding your research question.
- Report what others have said about your research question.
Activity: Example of Data
Check out this very detailed data about frozen lasagna. Did you ever think this much data was available? Are there elements new to you? How might you use such data?
Movie: Reinterpreting Little Red Riding Hood
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What is data? The word means many things to many people. (Consider “data” as it relates to your phone contract, for instance!) For our purposes, a definition we like is “units of information observed, collected, or created in the course of research.”
Erway, Ricky. 2013. Starting the Conversation: University-wide Research Data Management Policy. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research.
http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/rese...13/2013-08.pdf
Data observed, collected, or cerated for research purposes can be numbers , text , images , audio clips , and video clips . But in this section on using data as sources, we’re going to concentrate on numerical data.
From the Latin. Data is the plural of datum. (It’s similar to how media is the plural of medium.)
Sometimes data is actually necessary to answer research questions, particularly in the social sciences and life and physical sciences. For instance, data would be necessary to support or rule out these hypotheses:
- More women than men voted in the last presidential election in a majority of states.
- A certain drugs shows promising results in the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
- Listening to certain genres of music lowers blood pressure.
- People of certain religious denominations are more likely to find a specific television program objectionable.
- The average weight of house cats in the United States has increased over the past 30 years.
- The average square footage of supermarkets in the United States has increased in the past 20 years.
- More tomatoes were consumed per person in the United Kingdom in 2015 than in 1962.
- Exploding volcanoes can help cool the planet by spewing sulfur dioxide, which combines with water vapor to make reflective aerosols.
So using numeric data in those portions of your final product that require evidence can really strengthen your argument for your argument for your answer to your research question. At other times, even if data is not actually necessary, numeric data can be particularly persuasive and sharpen the points you want to make in other portions of your final product devoted to, say, describing the situation surrounding your research question. (See Making an Argument )
For example, for a term paper about the research question “Why is there a gap in the number of people who qualify for food from foodbanks and the number of people who use foodbanks?,” you could find data on the website of Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of foodbanks. Some of that data may be the number of people who get food from a foodbank annually, with the number of seniors and children broken out. Those data won’t answer your research question, but they will help you describe the situation around that question and help your audience develop a fuller understanding.
Similarly, for a project with the research question “How do some birds in Australia use “smart” hunting techniques to flush out prey, including starting fires?,” you might find a journal article with data about how many people have observed these techniques and estimates of how frequently the techniques are used and by how many bird species.
Obtaining Data
There are two ways of obtaining data:
- Obtain data that already has been collected and analyzed. That’s what this section will cover.
- Collect data yourself. This can include activities such as making observations about your environment, conducting surveys or interviews, directly recording measurements in a lab or in the field, or even receiving electronic data recorded by computers/machines that gather the data. You will explore these activities in courses you take.
Finding Data in Articles, Books, Web Pages, and More
Numeric search data can be found all over the place. A lot of it can be found as part of another source- such as books; journal, newspaper, and magazine articles; and web pages. In these cases, the data do not stand alone as a distinct element, but instead are part of the larger work.
When searching for data in books and articles and on web pages, terms such as statistics or data may or may not be useful search terms. That’s because many writers don’t use those terms in their scholarly writing. They tend to use the words findings or results when talking about the data that could be useful to you. In addition, statistics is a separate discipline and using that term will turn up lots of journals in that area, which won’t be helpful to you. So use the search terms data and statistics with caution, especially when searching library catalogs. (See information on the Library Catalog . More information on searching is at Precision Searching .)
Even without using those search terms, many scholarly sources you turn up are likely to contain data. Once you find potential sources, skim them for tables, graphs, or charts. These items are displays or illustrations of data gathered by researchers. However, sometimes data and interpretations are solely in the body of the narrative text and may be included in sections called “Results” or “Findings.” (That shouldn’t keep you from displaying the data in charts, graphs, or tables as you like in your own work, though. See Data Visualization later in this section.)
If the data you find in a book, article, or web page is particularly helpful and you want more, you could contact the author to request additional numeric research data. Researchers will often discuss their data and its analysis – and sometimes provide some of it (or occasionally, all). Some may link to a larger numeric research data set. However, if a researcher shares his or her data with you, it may be in a raw form. This means that you might have to do additional analysis to make it useful in answering your question.
Depending on your research question, you may need to gather data from multiple sources to get everything you need to answer your research question and make your argument for it. (See Making an Argument .)
For instance, in our example related to foodbanks above, we suggested where you could find statistics about the number of people who get food from American foodbanks. But with that research question (“Why is there a gap in the number of people who qualify for food from foodbanks and the number of people who use foodbanks?”), you would also need to find out from another source how many people qualify for foodbanks based on their income and compare that number with how many people actually use foodbanks.
Finding Data, Data Depositories, and Directories
Sometimes the numeric research data you need may not be in the articles, books, and web sites that you’ve found. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been collected and packaged in a useable format. Governments and research institutions often publish data they have collected in discipline-specific data depositories that make data available online. Here are some examples:
- United States Census Bureau
- Budget of the United States Government
- U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
- National Center for Education Statistics
- Daily Weather Maps NOAA)
- GeoData.gov
- The World Factbook (CIA)
- OSU Knowledge Bank
The United Nations and just about every country provide information as numeric data available online. Free and accessible data like this is called open data. The U.S. federal government, all states, and many local governments provide open data. You can find them (among other places) at site: .gov.
Other data are available through vendors who publish the data collected by researchers. Here are some examples:
- Hoover’s Online (OSU Only)
- International Monetary Fund Statistical Databases
- World Health Organization Statistical Information System
- Envirofacts
- Census of Agriculture (OSU only)
- OECD Education at a Glance
- Corruption Perceptions Index
Don’t know if a depository that could contain data in your discipline? Check out a data directory such as re3data.org