Book review: Gathering Data for Your PhD

Gathering data for your Phd is a small but useful book. It only took me one afternoon to finish it. This book gives a brief introduction the advantages and disadvantages of different data collection approaches. For instance, questionnaire, interview(structured, semi-structured, unstructured, mobile interview, face-to-fact), focus group, participant observation, etc. You will be encourage to use/invent an approach that is suitable for your study, for example, drawing and writing for young children, storying telling, diaries and so on.

While you are reading this book, you may focus on the part that covers the research approach you are interested in. There are many useful references for each approach. Since I am conducting social media data analysis, I mainly focus on the research ethics, mobile Apps and possibly gaming data (I do wish to write a mini game to collect attention/self-monitor skill related data, because it should be easier to collect data with a game, sample could be a bit biased though)

Here I selected some useful resources from the book for my future reference

 

• Research ethics:

 

Informed consent

Research ethics online training

https://globalhealthtrainingcentre.tghn.org/

introduction to research ethics

https://globalhealthtrainingcentre.tghn.org/elearning/research-ethics/

 

social media and research ethical resource

https://vision2lead.com/what-we-do/ethics/e-research-ethics-resources/

 

(I might spend some time to do the research ethics online training in the coming few days. The training center offers a certificate, not sure how useful it is, but it doesn’t seem to take me too long to finish that course.)

 

• Gathering data online raises tricky ethical issues around anonymity and confidentiality, because social media blurs the boundaries between private and public.

 

APIs

https://www.programmableweb.com/

(thousands of APIs in here!)