| Current Systems
Currently, researchers have several ways
of viewing survey data, but the process of finding anything
meaningful is time consuming and inefficient.
CBE has developed an online reporting tool
that provides an overview of a single survey by creating charts
that show how respondents answered each question. This tool
has been useful for initial viewing of survey results, but
is not very robust for finding correlations or drawing meaningful
conclusions.
In order to do any sort of analysis, researchers
must export the data to a .csv file and import it into Excel
or another statistical application, such as SPSS or SAS. Most
researchers initially used Excel for simple analysis, and
sometimes proceeded to more robust statistics tools for complex
statistics. One GSR reported to use KaleidaGraph
for generating charts because it had a smaller file size and
was somewhat easier to use.
With all these applications, the raw data
is unwieldy and creating charts takes significant set-up time
and may not yield useful results. These programs are not intended
to be exploratory tools, so do not enable quick data comparisons
which is a necessary step in analysis.
On occasion, researchers request that the
survey team gather specific data manually from the database
to facilitate comparisons with past surveys. This process
is time consuming and sometimes needs to be repeated for different
projects.
More information on the current processes
and systems are available in the following sections:
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