There are many ways to collect and analyze your data! Much of this depends on the type of data you are working with, or plan on working with. It'll also depend on your methodology. You need to take at least one methodology course, but it's probably a good idea to take more so you can explore different research designs.

Collecting Data

If your data collection involves doing work with people, you might consider how you will collect your data. Are you doing interviews? Participant observation? An ethnography? Depending on how you work with people, your collection of data might look a little bit different, and it is important to note this in your methods section. For instance, how did you decide on a sample size? How did you ask people to be part of your project (i.e. snowball sampling).

Data Collection with Human Participants

If you are doing interviews with people, you might want to record your interviews and then transcribe them. If you are doing more of a participant observation approach, you might want to take detailed notes of the areas you are in, thinking about how people are interacting with each other, you, and the environment. Then, when you go back to analyze your data, you can pick out important words, phrases, ideas, or memories that they mention which directly relate to your thesis or chapter topic. You can also pick out important themes by going through transcriptions of interviews and/or going through your detailed observation notes.

If you are not doing research with human subjects, your data collection might look a little bit different depending on the data you are using. For instance, you might be doing archival research, in which case you are searching for historical material that relates to your topic and argument. Or, you might be doing research on materials like toys, or maybe a content analysis on curricula or a curriculum document. In this case, you might go through these materials and look for examples or themes that come out--much like you could be doing if you were analyzing interview data from human subjects.

From Collection to Analysis

Importantly, as you go through your data collection and analysis, you might find that you are collecting and analyzing data in many ways. This could be through your raw data, such as interviews or through material/discourse analyses. However, as you read various articles or books and do your research, you still do critical analysis--i.e. asking questions about the material, making connections to your arguments, etc. In this way, the analytic skills you have developed throughout your PhD journey will be very important as you continue to collect and analyse the data that you collect.

Remember...

One useful tip that might be helpful as you collect your data, and especially as you analyse it, is to return to your thesis question: what, in other words, is the main crux of your dissertation and how does the data you collect support your thesis work? How will your analysis illustrate the importance of your data to your thesis and to its argument?