Part Four ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION OF DATA McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights Reserved.

Chapter Fifteen DATA PREPARATION AND DESCRIPTION

Editing Detects errors and omissions, Corrects them when possible, and Certifies that minimum data quality standards are achieved

Editing (cont.) Guarantees that data are accurate consistent with other information uniformly entered complete arranged to simplify coding and tabulation

Editing Field Editing translation of ad hoc abbreviations and symbols used during data collection validation of the field results. Central Editing

Coding Rules that guide the establishment of category sets Appropriate to the research problem and purpose Exhaustive Mutually exclusive Derived from one classification principle

Content Analysis for Coding Measures the semantic content of a message Researches the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the content of a communication Syntactical unit Referential unit Propositional unit Thematic unit

Data Entry Options Optical scanning Voice recognition Keyboard

Data Entry Formats Database with full screen editor Spreadsheet

Descriptive Statistics Distribution Descriptors Location Spread Shape

Descriptive Statistics Distribution Descriptors Location Central Tendency Mean Median Mode

Descriptive Statistics Distribution Descriptors Spread Variance, Standard Deviation, Range, Interquartile Range

Descriptive Statistics Distribution Descriptors Shape Skewness Kurtosis