ABSTRACT
Data collection and analysis is a multi-discipline and multi-team effort. This chapter offers suggestions for methodologies to collect, analyze, and present reliability data for all types of safety systems, with a focus on sprinklers. They are organized in six steps: development of problem and purpose (is the issue clear or not, descriptive or explanatory, and desirable to generalize the findings?); choice of overall study design (intensive, extensive study design, or both?); how data are collected (operationalization, how to make a concept measurable, design of the study, source and use of sources, and selection and limitation); analysis, quality assurance of the analysis (conceptual validity, validation of correlations, external validity, and are the results trustworthy?); and discussion and presentation (methodological discussion, substantial discussion—connection of findings and theory, and presentation, also uncertainty). Two different kinds of studies, simple and complex, are suggested.
