Using Fosslook as a Database for Sociology Studies
Introduction
The most routine part of the sociologists work is surveying the groups of people and recording the resulting data to the database for further study. Therefore, sociologists are looking for a solution that can help them to simplify and accelerate the work associated with the preparation of surveys, data input and output.
This article shows how you can successfully use the FossLook platform to automate and simplify the workflow of the companies engaged in sociological research.
Where to store the sociology studies data?
Sociological research can be done in a variety of different ways: telephone poll, interview, questionnaire, and others. Some of them are quite cheap and don't require so much effort as others. Statistically, the most commonly used of them are questionnaires.
They typically consist of a set of questions related to the subject of the study. Different sociological questionnaires often use the same standard questions, such as gender, age, income level, as well as the same common responses.
Using the FossLook "Document Libraries", you can easily design any kind of questionnaire, as well as catalogs that will allow you to quickly enter the data in the process of sociological research.
As a result of all the entered data will be stored in a single database with the ability to quickly find and display the information you need. Below, we'll look at how you can effectively organize the data storage of the sociological studies and automate surveys processing.
The questionnaire example
All right, let's look at how we can create a simple questionnaire, that shows, for example, the attitude of certain groups of people to sport.
Your gender?
Your age?
How often do you exercise?
- — daily
- — few times a week
- — several times per month
- — never
What part of your monthly budget is spent on sports?
- almost nothing
- 5%
- 20%
- more than 20%
Open the FossLook administrator and Create a new type of document - "Sport questionnaire":
Here, the "Gender" field refers to the existing system reference catalog. Fields "Age", "Exercise frequency", "Exercise budget" refer to the newly created reference catalogs that need to be filled with corresponding values: "17-20", "Daily", "5%" and so on. Enabling the "Attachments" function will allow you to attach, for example, scanned copies of the questionnaire.
Next, Provide access to the folder where the questionnaires are stored, for all users, who will conduct the interviews. Also, create the values for the reference catalogs.
The employee who is conducting the survey can easily fill in the necessary fields of the questionnaire, and then attach a scanned copy:
Working with the survey results
When the gathered data becomes available electronically for analysis, it is usually called "data set." After entering all survey results into the database, you will get the picture that looks like this:
Next, sociologists usually explore, analyze, and illuminate this data in some new ways for different purposes. They're looking for patterns and correlations to better understand the subject of the study. There's so many things you can do with it at this point. For example, you can filter these results as you wish, like, select all female participants:
Filtered results can be easily exported to an external file (.csv) for further analysis in Excel or in specialized programs for statistical data processing:
Conclusions
In conducting research, sociologists need to work with huge volumes of data. All this work can take a lot of time from the actual research itself. Instead of spending this time on dealing with manual data entry, try to automate your process with special software like FossLook. It allows you to design surveys of any complexity, quickly enter, filter and display any data for further processing in the statistical programs.
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