The importance of data
As researchers, we like data. Data helps us to understand questions such as: is our program working? How is it working? Who is working for? Are we reaching the right people? Are champions running the program as we intended? Are there any barriers or facilitators to implementation? How can we improve? Good data is essential for building the evidence base around supporting desk workers to sit less and move more. We are currently deep in the process of cleaning, coding and preparing to analyse the data from the implementation trial of BeUpstanding and thought this might be a good opportunity to discuss the importance of data. So, how do we decide what data to collect? The type of data depends on the research question we are trying to address. In BeUpstanding, we are trying to address a lot of research questions, so we are collecting lots of different types of data. For those of you who have taken part in the program, you may have completed surveys. Surveys are a very common data collection method as you can easily collect large amounts of data and — if you are asking numeric questions — the data can be relatively easily analysed.…
