10. Collecting High Quality data

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort." - John Ruskin

Lesson Prerequisites

This lesson assumes you have completed the Intro to Stata lesson.

0. Intro to Collecting High Quality Data

In this lesson we will cover why high quality data is important and what can be done to ensure data is of high quality

  1. Why high quality data is important

Bad data can lead to bad results, which lead to misguided recommendations and ultimately bad policy!

2. What errors are we worried about

We're worried about data that can make our results unreliable--either because they are noisy or biased

3. What leads to errors and how to mitigate errors in data collection

We can make our data vulnerable to error before, during and after data collection. Fortunately, there are strategies to reduce the likelihood of (or at least mitigate the consequences of) error at each stage

<-- One of the two top links to the left should work

4. Example with data

This dataset was downloaded on February 3rd 2016 after 3 days of data collection. Do we see any problems?

5. Conclusion