For drafting a good dissertation, one must master various skills. Dissertation writing needs some additional skills like data analysis techniques that are not necessary for writing other types of academic writing tasks. Broadly, dissertation writing is divided into five chapters: background, literature review, methods, data analyses, and results and findings. All these chapters differ greatly and have different formatting and writing style. The most confusing chapter that seems daunting to the majority of students is the collection and analysis of data for a dissertation. The collection of research survey data is relatively simple but a lengthy process.
However, for analyzing the data, one must deal with outliers, random and systematic errors, and other technicalities. To bring ease to data collection and analysis, digital technologies did a lot of work for us. Now, using some users’ friendly tools, one can easily collect data and analyze it within a fraction of time. This article is all about listing the top ten tools that students of the 20th century can use to collect and analyze data in a dissertation.
Table of Contents
1. SurveySparrow:
SurveySparrow is one of the best data collection tools. There are various reasons behind its popularity. Its chat-like surveys option and conversational forms make the data collection process highly efficient. It aims to provide data in a highly organized form that helps researchers to collect and analyze data more easily.
2. Kobo Toolbox
It is a tool that a dissertation writer can even install on an Android phone. Through multiple updates, the team Kobo Toolbox made this software bug free. Researchers, either business trends analytics or dissertation writers, use this software to create and send forms online. Researchers use this tool to collect research survey data.
Google form:
Using Google forms, one can easily collect and analyze research survey data by creating surveys either on mobile forms or web browsers. You can easily use Google Forms in only three steps. Firstly, you need to go to forms.google.com and press the icon to open a new form. Secondly, edit and format a form to induce all important changes that are necessary to make it useful for collecting a specific type of data relevant to your project.
Before moving to the next step, you must not forget to save a survey in a folder of your choice. Lastly, share it with applicants that are potential respondents for your study. The most exciting feature of Google Forms is that you can even analyze trends in the collected data without using any additional statistical analysis tool.
3. Jotforms
Jotforms is another important type of tool to collect research survey data. It is popular for conducting business surveys. However, you can also use it to generate forms that can collect data for your dissertation as well. The most probable reason behind the popularity of Jotforms is you can collect data even in the form of voice recordings, electronic signatures, geolocations, and bar codes. Thus, it is an excellent choice if you want to avoid traditional survey forms to collect and analyze data.
4. Forms on Fire:
Like other tools, Forms on Fire also has some exciting features that make the collection of research survey data easier for students of all ages. It facilitates its users in monitoring and management of data simultaneously. It includes drag and drop interface that makes data collection more fascinating, especially for students who are usually impatient and used to shrink hearts from long term data entry projects. You can use the Form on Fire in three simple steps: design an intuitive form, collect relevant information, and manage the collected data to reach some useful consequences related to the problem statement of a dissertation.
5. Microsoft Excel:
Excel is a simple but powerful tool to analyze research survey data for a dissertation. It is a part of Microsoft Office, and it is freely available in downloadable form. Almost all dissertation writers seek help from Excel at one or another stage of research. The data analytics interface of Excel allows its users to perform various types of statistical procedures in data analysis. It is user-friendly, and you can start using it by learning only a few basics.
6. GraphPad Prism:
GraphPad Prism is an excellent option for students conducting qualitative as well as quantitative studies. It combines scientific graphing, easy-to-understand statistics, comprehensive curve fitting, and data organization for providing fast results after data analysis. It is a good option to analyze data for dissertation writers; however, it won’t replace heavy-duty professional data analytics tools. It is helpful even in studies, including laboratory and clinical trials.
For using GraphPad Prism, you just need to form a data table and click on create new graph button. The drop-down list helps you confirm whether you have uploaded the right data table or file. Once you are sure that the software will process the right table, then click the ‘plot selected data sets only’, and the software will form a graph using all the entries in the data table.
The graphs formed by using the GraphPad Prism can easily be interpreted. For making attractive graphs, you can use also select a colour scheme on your own.
7. SAS:
SAS is another statistical analysis tool that you can use to analyze the collected data for a dissertation. It offers options to either use the GUI or create scripts for advanced-level analysis. It is premium data analyses tool that businesses, healthcare workers, and researchers performing social sciences studies mostly used. It also helps researchers in analyzing the data and presents it in publication-worthy charts and graphs.
Final Thoughts:
In a nutshell, to collect and analyze research survey data, the list of tools that you can use along with its procedures lasts several pages. The article highlighted only the eight best tools that will be the right choice if you want to collect and analyze data for a dissertation in 2022. However, other tools such as Minitab, SPSS (IBM), MatLab, R, and Python can also be the right choice to collect and analyze data. Meanwhile if you have no idea about usage of these software, hiring a dissertation writing service can be much beneficial for you.
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