15-1 Part Four ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION OF DATA 15-2 McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights Reserved. Chapter Fifteen DATA PREPARATION AND DESCRIPTION 15-3 Editing • Detects errors and omissions, • Corrects them when possible, and • Certifies that minimum data quality standards are achieved 15-4 Editing (cont.) • Guarantees that data are – accurate – consistent with other information – uniformly entered – complete – arranged to simplify coding and tabulation 15-5 Editing • Field Editing – translation of ad hoc abbreviations and symbols used during data collection – validation of the field results. • Central Editing 15-6 Coding • Rules that guide the establishment of category sets – Appropriate to the research problem and purpose – Exhaustive – Mutually exclusive – Derived from one classification principle 15-7 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 15-8 Data Entry Options • Optical scanning • Voice recognition • Keyboard 15-9 Data Entry Formats • Database with full screen editor • Spreadsheet 15-10 Descriptive Statistics • Distribution Descriptors – Location – Spread – Shape 15-11 Descriptive Statistics • Distribution Descriptors – Location • Central Tendency – Mean – Median – Mode 15-12 Descriptive Statistics • Distribution Descriptors – Spread • Variance, • Standard Deviation, • Range, • Interquartile Range 15-13 Descriptive Statistics • Distribution Descriptors – Shape • Skewness • Kurtosis 15-14