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The goal of social science research is to produce and make publicly available the results to advance knowledge, deepen understanding and, ultimately, improve well-being. That broad goal is advanced when scientists keep up with recent developments of their colleagues by attending conferences and reading the literature, when they make well-reasoned arguments, and when they write and publish research papers to communicate their own empirical findings and interpretations. Good workflow also contributes to this goal by making us more efficient, providing us and our colleagues greater confidence in our work, reducing error, and creating stronger foundations for future research. By workflow I mean practices implemented on a day-to-day basis while conducting research that organize and document our analysis of empirical data. Any empirical research, whether quantitative or qualitative, involves workflow, but the focus of this document is on workflow for the analysis of secondary quantitative data sources.
Workflow Goals
Your workflow should
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- Organize and document your research results
- Link results with process that produce them
- Help you to find what you were doing last time you worked on the project.
- Document known errors and inconsistencies in data.
- Allow collaboration. Your workflow needs to accommodate different work styles and computing systems.
- Provide opportunities to find errors.
- Allow you to build on past results in future studies, but also archive materials to replicate past results.
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