ABSTRACT
This chapter presents steps in identifying data collection and management costs, and aids the reader to calculate resource needs and timing of those needs and to estimate a project budget. The process of budgeting can have a tremendous value to the researcher. Modeling the data collection and management starts with identifying the high-level tasks to be performed. Modeling data collection and acquisition are especially important when there are multiple observation points over time per observational or experimental unit, and multiple different types of data are collected. A project budget assigns costs to the resources used in the project. Budgeting for human resources takes into account additional costs of employing humans. The chapter provides two examples for research studies where the data collection activities were modeled and projected. Once a research study is decomposed into tasks and all of the tasks are counted, associating costs is easy.
