in this short video I am going to explain to you what is data analysis and
how you can use this for your research and we are starting right after this
short break
hello and welcome to my channel my name is Tahir and if this is your first
time please hit the subscribe button and also the notification bell to get
notified whenever I post a new video on this channel every Tuesday and Friday
recently two of my subscribers they requested me to make videos on data
analysis and the problem is that this is a big field and you have to make at
least five videos in order to explain this subject but then I decided to help
my subscribers students whatever I quote by explaining a bigger picture of data
analysis and in this video as you can see that this is a diagram which I am
going to explain to you and hopefully you will get some idea out of this what
is data analysis and how you can use this in your research because some
students when they are starting their PhD they even don't understand where
several things fit together so in this diagram which looks a little bit chaotic
at this moment I am trying to explain without giving any example how you can
use data analysis in your research now the first question is why I am not using
any example in this and the reason I'm not using any example is because my main
discipline is engineering but most of my subscribers they are not engineers they
are from other backgrounds so if I put any example from my field of research
they might not understand this and if I use a very simple example like from
Social Sciences then that will not be very useful so therefore I made this
bigger picture as open-ended so that you can apply this to your research and here
is how you can do this first of all at the top of this diagram as you can see
that I have mentioned research objectives and a research question so
your research objectives must be clear to you and these research objectives can
be more than 1 1 2 3 4 whatever are your research objectives so the first thing
you should clear that your research question is
closely associated with your research objectives so actually your research
question emerges from your objective of the research but your research question
should be very specific and very focused no the first thing you need to do is
make your research question and for this what you can do there are lot of videos
I have made which will help you to understand how to develop a research
proposal our research question you can watch those videos in PhD section in a
playlist on my channel but once you have created your research question then you
try to brainstorm and try to think about three four five more questions and the
important thing about these sub questions as you can see here q1 q2 q3
these sub questions must be must with those questions which will shed light on
your main research question if you get answers to these sub questions then you
should be able to shed some light on your main research question this is very
important and if you don't do this that all your data analysis will be waste of
time so from your main search question try to figure out some simple sub
questions which are relatively simple to get answers this is another condition
your research question is a complex question but these sub questions are the
questions which are relatively simpler than the main question and once you
figure out these questions these questions not necessarily be only three
questions there could be five six questions then you determine what are
the variables in these questions what are the things which are changing based
on some other parameters in this question so there could be certain fixed
parameters and such certain variables and no because these sub questions are
simpler than your main research questions so one question could be in
which you are trying to find a relationship between two parameters for
example I have shown in this diagram violet and a yellow these are the two
parameters you want to get a relationship between these two then
there is another question in which you want to find out the relationship
between any other two parameters and then there would be a question where you
want to find out a relationship between not two but more than two three four
five parameters and that question is so complex that you cannot separate the
variables you can only figure out the effect of all those variables together
so think about your problem and gel then you will find that most of the question
in PhD research specifically they fall under this category in which there are a
lot of variables acting together and you can only get a complete output but you
cannot separate those variables and I will talk about this in the last part of
this video so now you have these sub three sub questions you have a set of
variables just make a list of all those variables and how you are going to
collect the information and now you collect the information from one of the
data sources and on this figure you will see I have mentioned few data sources
but there are actually unlimited types of data sources available for you they
are not five or ten data sources like you can get data from experiments you
can get data from surveys interviews focus groups historical data but you can
also get data from other sources once you have got that data for example when
you are making surveys you have to create a questionnaire I have made a
video about how to create a questionnaire that is a detail with you
about questionnaire you can watch that video I will put that video at the end
of this video so what happens now is that you are getting a lot of data and
some of this data is not useful some variables are the variables of interest
but there is some other information which is not very useful don't discard
this information straight away you have to find a data processing of preliminary
data analysis which is called data processing in which you try to filter it
out and find some the data now because for example you are
gathering data on your Google spreadsheet by using Google Forms which
is a kind of survey know that Google sheet contains a lot of data then you
just look at that data and this is the processing part look at that data just
scan or make some quick plots between any two variables because there will be
a lot of variables and you can understand that this data is not
relevant actually you can discard this or you can keep it for later reference
if you find later on that this is actually a very important data after
this preliminary data analysis you will get a set of organized variables so this
is your organized data you might have to manually organize this data for example
cutting and pasting the variables of interest put it in columns where you are
actually going to do the final analysis now here is the part which is most
important once you have this organized data this is the scientific part which
begins from here once you have the organized data in front of you for
example if there are only a relationship between two variables which you are
interested in as I shown here the violet and the yellow for example then who
might be thinking about plotting a scatter plot which is a type of data
analysis tool so you might plot a scatter plot between this violet and
yellow thing then another two variables are there well you might be interested
in plotting a histogram because histogram provides you a certain type of
information then if the variables are together complex form then you might be
interested in using some other tools more sophisticated data analysis tools
which can handle this kind of data and these tools are for example principal
component analysis our singular value decomposition or some other linear
algebra tools or statistic tools no this is the selection at this point which you
have to make that which tool is appropriate for the data analysis of
these particular variables so this is the
final stage and once you have used any of these methods and you get the
appropriate results of these three sub questions which will shed some light on
your main question then your data analysis is complete that is it now you
have to discuss the results now you can say that this was our research questions
we investigated these three sub factors which are affecting our main question
and this is the result this is what we found and if you want to support an
argument you have to provide the most critical thing which is called the
evidence of your hypothesis are the evidence are the proof of what you are
trying to say that this is my original contribution to the knowledge and this
is the evidence of this this is the proof of this so this is what will make
your PhD this is the core of your PhD know the tools and techniques which you
are going to use this is a separate knowledge you have to gain by taking a
course in for example linear algebra so there is another video which I have
already made which says that three subjects which every PhD student must
take so please watch that video and you will understand and there are some other
videos also available for PD students if you are doing PhD and you are new to my
channel so you may watch those videos so I hope that this video will help you
understand what is data analysis and how you can apply this to your own research
and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up thanks for watching and
see you next time
you