Essentially, collecting data means putting your design for collecting information into operation.  You’ve decided how you’re going to get information – whether by direct observation, interviews, surveys, experiments and testing, or other methods – and now you and/or other observers have to implement your plan.  There’s a bit more to collecting data, however.  If you are conducting observations, for example, you’ll have to define what you’re observing and arrange to make observations at the right times, so you actually observe what you need to.  You’ll have to record the observations in appropriate ways and organize them so they’re optimally useful. Recording and organizing data may take different forms, depending on the kind of information you’re collecting.  The way you collect your data should relate to how you’re planning to analyze and use it.  Regardless of what method you decide to use, recording should be done concurrent with data collection if possible, or soon afterwards, so that nothing gets lost and memory doesn’t fade. Some of the things you might do with the information you collect include:

·         Gathering together information from all sources and observations.

·         Making photocopies of all recording forms, records, audio or video recordings, and any other collected materials, to guard against loss, accidental erasure, or other problems.

·         Entering narratives, numbers, and other information into a computer program, where they can be arranged and/or worked on in various ways.

·         Performing any mathematical or similar operations needed to get quantitative information ready for analysis.  These might, for instance, include entering numerical observations into a chart, table, or spreadsheet, or figuring the mean (average), median (midpoint), and/or mode (most frequently occurring) of a set of numbers.

·         Transcribing (making an exact, word-for-word text version of) the contents of audio or video recordings. 

·         Coding data (translating data, particularly qualitative data that isn’t expressed in numbers, into a form that allows it to be processed by a specific software program or subjected to statistical analysis.)

·         Organizing data in ways that make them easier to work with.  How you do this will depend on your research design and your evaluation questions.  You might group observations by the dependent variable (indicator of success) they relate to, by individuals or groups of participants, by time, by activity, etc.  You might also want to group observations in several different ways, so that you can study interactions among different variables.