Tuesday, September 06, 2011

A small victory. The survey  data for Haiti is completely  entered and  now  exists in  digital  form. This  meant pretty much a solid week of sitting at my  laptop as  surveyors  brought in  the forms from the field,  typing in  the  information and then double checking  every single data point before finally sending to  the  online data base we  set up for  this purpose.  I  recently read  a  stats  analysis  book where the author claimed that he  spends  about 80% of his time getting data ready  for  analysis,  and about 20% of his time  actually  doing the analysis. I was comforted  to know  that, because  I thought  maybe it was only my problem.


1 comment:

Mark Hare said...

I'm surprised to know that it is as high as 20%. Maybe the author didn't want to discourage folks.

There is also the post-confirmation. Agame in Papaye enters the data from the crew and "verifies" the data, but there are always errors that slip through, which you find as you analyze the data. Like "rabbits" being classified as one of our vegetable types.