Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | Assignment Comments | Teaching Materials

You will need to look at the paper carefully as some of the details that you seek may be described only briefly or not at all. For example, most papers do not report pilot studies or their procedures for seeking informed consent. We expect and hope that both were done but most journal papers do not require these details to be reported. You will also see that some studies use combinations of techniques to obtain different types of data. For example, anecdotes and observations are often used in conjunction with quantitative data, such as that collected from experiments or data logging. Together these different data sources provide a broader picture of the situation than either data source would offer on its own.