Research Tips

Make Your Tables First

One good way to ensure that your research project has been designed well is to create the tables you want to appear in your final report before you’ve collected your data. The numbers in the tables are not important at this stage (they can be left blank or filled in with made-up numbers). What is important is that you can point to the particular questions that will be used to generate the information necessary to complete each table: if you can’t, then you need to add questions. Also, if you have questions that are not linked to anything you plan to include in your final report, then you should reconsider whether those questions need to be asked at all.