ABSTRACT
The fundamental building block of all research consists of data. Data can take many different forms and can be gathered in many different ways. In their most irreducible form, data can be quantitative or qualitative. Increasingly, and in more and more disciplines, data employed in political science research projects exist in both quantitative and qualitative form. In addition to different forms, data can be gathered in many different ways-by interview, questionnaire, overt or covert observation, by analysis of documents or artifacts, or by the subjective experiences of the researcher, to name only the most commonly encountered data collection methods (Martin 2000). Regardless of their form or how they are gathered, in their raw state data have little or no intrinsic meaning. Data must be processed, analyzed, and interpreted by a researcher before they take on any rational sense.
