Data as Sources

Using data as sources can help with all your research project’s information needs:

• Learn more background information.
• Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.)
• Convince your audience that your answer is correct. (Data often give you evidence that your answer to your research question is correct or at least a reasonable answer.)
• Describe the situation surrounding your research question.
• Report what others have said about your research question.

What is data? The word means many things to many people. (Consider “data” as it relates to your phone contract, for instance!) For our purposes, a definition we like is “units of information observed, collected, or created in the course of research.”

Data observed or collected for research purposes can be numbers, text, images, audio clips, and video clips. But in this section on using data as sources, we’re going to concentrate on numerical data.

Sometimes data are necessary to answer research questions, particularly in the social sciences and life and physical sciences. For instance, data would be necessary to support or rule out these hypotheses:

• More women than men voted in the last presidential election in most states.
• A certain drug shows promising results in the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
• Listening to certain genres of music lowers blood pressure.
• People of certain religious denominations are more likely to find a specific television program objectionable.
• The average weight of house cats in the United States has increased over the past 30 years.
• The average square footage of supermarkets in the United States has increased in the past 20 years.
• More tomatoes were consumed per person in the United Kingdom in 2015 than in 1962.
• Exploding volcanoes can help cool the planet by spewing sulfur dioxide, which combines with water vapor to make reflective aerosols.

Using numeric data in those portions of your final product that require evidence can really strengthen your argument.  At other times, even if data is not actually necessary, numeric data can be particularly persuasive and sharpen the points you want to make in other portions of your final product devoted to, say, describing the situation surrounding your research question.

For example, for a paper about the research question “Why is there a gap in the number of people who qualify for food from foodbanks and the number of people who use foodbanks?,” you could find data on the website of Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of foodbanks. Some of that data may be the number of people who get food from a foodbank annually, with the number of seniors and children broken out. Those data won’t answer your research question, but they will help you describe the situation around that question and help your audience develop a fuller understanding.

Similarly, for a project with the research question “How do some birds in Australia use ‘smart’  hunting techniques to flush out prey, including starting fires?” you might find a journal article with data about how many people have observed these techniques, estimates of how frequently the techniques are used, and by how many bird species.

Obtaining Data

There are two ways of obtaining data:

• Obtain data that already has been collected and analyzed. That’s what this section covers.
• Collect data yourself. This can include activities such as making observations about your environment, conducting surveys or interviews, directly recording measurements in a lab or in the field, or even receiving electronic data recorded by computers/machines that gather the data. You may explore these activities in other courses you take.

People as Sources

People don’t just create the sources we use. They are actually sources themselves. Most of us use people as sources all the time in our private lives, such when we ask a friend for a restaurant recommendation or ask whether a movie is worth watching. But you probably aren’t using people as sources very often in your assignments–unless you are a journalism major, of course.

In fact, research indicates that employers such as Battelle, Nationwide Insurance, Microsoft, the FBI, the Smithsonian, the Port of Los Angeles, SS&G Financial Services, and Marriott International have been dissatisfied with their new hires’ inability to gather information by talking with real people. They’ve found new hires unwilling or unprepared to ask the experienced employee down the hall or the expert across town for information to solve a problem. For instance, the study linked to above quotes one employer as saying about new hires:

Here’s something we’re targeting in interviews now—the big thing is they believe the computer is their workspace, so basic interactions between people are lost. They won’t get up and walk over and ask someone a question. They are less comfortable and have some lack of willingness to use people as sources and also have a lack of awareness that people are a valid source of information…

Getting some experience using people as sources is likely to help you not just with a current research assignment but with your work in the future.

Important: Who’s an “Expert”?

Experts aren’t only researchers with Ph.D.s doing academic work. The question when trying to decide who can be a source is really: who can speak with authority about any part of the subject? And the answer to that question is always contextual, a kind of “it depends.”

People can speak with authority for different reasons. According to the framework for information literacy, they can have subject expertise (say, having done scholarship in the field), societal position (maybe a public office or other relevant work title), or special experience (say, living or working in a particular situation of interest or having participated in an historical event).

For instance, people who have had firsthand experience living or working with a situation (say, a survivor of a school shooting if your topic is on that subject) can have a unique perspective unavailable elsewhere. And it’s that up-close, firsthand view of the situation that gives them the authority that you and your audience respond to.

Of course, such sources have to be evaluated just like any other. Could they be biased? Like any source, yes. We just have to keep that possible bias in mind as we use the information from such a source. That’s part of exercising the critical thinking that research assignments are famous for producing.

Potentially biased or not, sometimes a source’s firsthand experience can’t be beat. And recognizing what they offer can help us open up to diverse ideas and worldviews that we would otherwise miss. Don’t be surprised if this kind of source takes you off in completely new directions with your assignment, ones that turn out to be much more interesting than those you were following before. For many researchers, finding sources that really open up a topic like that is one of the most rewarding things about doing research.

Interviewing

You can interview a person as a source on the phone, in email, with Skype, or face-to-face.

You’ll need to:

• Pay attention when reading other sources so you can identify whom to contact and know what they could have to offer.
• Prepare by learning enough about your topic so you can ask appropriate questions, know what your expert has done in relation to that topic so you don’t seem ignorant of their contribution, and know how to contact them. You might also want to do a practice interview with a friend.
• Contact your source to see if they are willing to talk with you and when that would be convenient. Then follow through.

Use good interview techniques, such as trying to put them at ease, using active listening techniques to encourage them to talk, asking follow up questions, and thanking them at the end of the interview.

Issues of data confidentiality, data storage (if interviews are recorded, either with audio or video recordings), dissemination of data beyond the classroom (like in this textbook, in a sample paper), the procedures required by IRB’s, etc. make this somewhat problematic. In academia, interview questions should be crafted carefully and reviewed by someone other than the interviewer. Release forms may be required. Also, interviews must be cited, like any other source.

Continue Reading: 21.8 Using Sources to Meet Your Needs