2. Exploration of online tools that are cheap
(translation:free) and easy to use
How to create a dashboard of statistics that
speak to stakeholders in your community
3. Is it an interesting question? Who is asking
the question?
Do you have the right data to answer these
questions?
If you don’t have the data, do you know
where to get it?
Do you have the right tools to do the
analyses?
Who is your audience?
When do you need to be done?
4. Questions to ask:
◦ Does the data have the right information (fields)?
◦ Do you know what each of the values in the relevant
fields stand for?
◦ Is the time frame relevant to answering the
question?
◦ Is it relevant to the geographical area for which you
doing the analysis?
◦ How reliable is the data?
◦ Is it one data set or more than one?
◦ If multiple data sets, can you relate them?
◦ What are the privacy, legal and security concerns?
5. For each data element ask the following
questions:
◦ Who collects this data?
◦ Why is this data being collected?
◦ Is there a reason for systematic bias in this data?
◦ Does this field contain a lot of missing data?
◦ Does this field contain a large number of outlier
values?
◦ Does the data make sense?
6. Census (www.census.gov)
NCES (nces.ed.gov)
NAAL (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/)
Other government open data projects
◦ Data.gov (http://www.data.gov/)
◦ NYC open data portal
(https://nycopendata.socrata.com/)
◦ NYS open data portal (https://data.ny.gov/)
◦ Data from other government entities (example:
School districts)
7. What is your MIS system capable of?
◦ Existing reports (with and without dissaggregation)
◦ Downloads of existing reports
◦ Data downloads
◦ Reviewing data screens
9. Watch out for
◦ Outliers and invalid values
◦ Number of records that make sense
Simple methods for cleaning your data
◦ Sorting in spreadsheets
◦ Frequency counts
Validate against other sources
10. Google Trends
◦ http://www.google.com/trends/
Google correlate
◦ http://www.google.com/trends/correlate
Google Fusion
Google Ngram Viewer
◦ https://books.google.com/ngrams
Tableau Public
◦ http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/
Microsoft Excel
