December 2018

Data entry

I have reached a point in this project, where I am slightly overwhelmed with the amount of data entry that needs to be completed within a reasonable time-frame, in order to provide schools with useful feedback on the wellbeing of their students. I am curious about how other researchers carrying out large surveys, or psychometric studies cope with this aspect of their research. We recruited large numbers of students (in one case, an entire school) to complete questionnaires once a week and then again at six month follow-up. Due to the nature of the data collection, this took place on one day, at the same time, in a classroom setting. The YP-CORE has been made into an electronic version and it would be easy to recreate this using an online survey host, such as qualtrics. However, schools generally do not have the resources to ensure that students can access one computer, or tablet each during this time and you cannot assume that all students have access to a personal mobile phone, and/or the internet. This made it impossible to carry out an internet survey, which would largely cut out the data entry process. If you have carried out a large school-based survey, or psychometric study, I would be interested to hear how you got around these issues and how you survived data entry, if you used the paper-and-pen method, as we did.