By John Towler, Ph.D. You'll need to figure out what trends and issues the data you collect reflects. Survey software offers data analysis capability, and other good statistical packages can help you analyze your survey results. Beware of the pitfalls of statistical analysis. You don't want to draw erroneous conclusions.
Data can be and have been manipulated to support numerous conclusions.
There are many ways to analyze the data you get, and the more knowledgeable you are, the more analytical you can be. All the survey software programs have some kind of statistical tools in them. If they aren't suitable, you can always use stand-alone statistical packages, but doing so requires some familiarity with the procedures they offer. Beware of Data Analysis Pitfalls Make sure you aviod erroneous conclusions. You'll want to pay particular attention to percentages if your sampling is small, because the margin for error increases as the size of the sample decreases.