ABSTRACT
Once you have gathered your data or identifi ed an existing data set, you have the raw material needed to examine your research questions. As a scientist, your job is to put those raw materials together in a creative way to make a novel product. To do this, you need to understand those raw materials in detail-what information do you have, exactly, and where are they stored? And, you need a statistical package to serve as your tool for implementing your ideas about how to put together those raw materials. In this chapter, we offer the basic strategies you need to follow in order to understand what is contained in a raw data fi le and its documentation and what the advantages are of using various statistical packages. In the next chapter, we will learn how to use those statistical packages to access the data and create some of the variables we will need for our quantitative analyses.
