Question

What is the purpose of raw data inspection and what should a researcher be looking for?

Burns, A. C., & Bush, R. F. (2012). Basic marketing research (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Answer 1

Answer-

The purpose of raw data inspection is to determine the presence of “bad” respondents and, if deemed advisable, to throw out the ones with severe problems”. Some of the things that a researcher should be looking for in order to find bad data include incomplete response, non-responses to specific questions (item omissions), yea-saying or nay-saying patterns, and middle-of-the-road patterns. “An incomplete response is a break-off where the respondent stops answering in the middle on the questionnaire”. Non-responses to specific questions (item omissions) occur when respondents inexplicably fail to complete certain items on a questionnaire. “A yea-saying pattern may be evident on one respondent in the form of all “yes” or “strongly agree” answers” with a nay-saying pattern meaning the opposite. “The middle-of-the-road pattern is seen as a preponderance of “no opinion” responses for questions. There are also some other data problems that may occur. Some of these instances include “more than one response option when only one was supposed to be checked,” others may have missed entire pages of questions, while others may “have ignored a agree-disagree scale and simply written in personal comments.