Week 3

•        Find reliable data sources [on the internet/others]

•     Clean your data, and understand the kind of data you have

•     Summarise data using tables and descriptive statistics

•     Visualise data using built-in chart tools

•     Connect different bits of data using Vlookup, min/max,

Practice Questions 

For effectively finding and manipulating data, Knight (2016) provides a set of practice questions and suggestion as follows:

1-Data sources: What and where?

Which source is better?  Why? C.R.A.P.

C – Currency, when was it published?

R – Relevance, un/biased? Detailed/general?

A – Authority, credentials, evidence, methods?

P – Purpose, why was it written? For whom?

2-Getting data

3-Cleaning data

•     ‘values only’

•      What do we need to get rid of?

4-Summarising Data

•      Where has the highest, and lowest rates?

5-Visualising the data

6-Evaluating Data

–     What can we tell from this data?

–     How credible are the sources?

–     What limitations are there in the data?