Analysis of Assessment Data

This week, you revisit methods for data assessment and analysis including software and computers. These tools have enabled researchers to collect, clean, manage, and analyze quantitative and qualitative data at high speed. For example, GIS is a helpful tool for quantitative analysis in community health assessment, and NVivo has been widely used in qualitative data analysis. Yet both continue to be problematic to many practitioners. You evaluate the benefits and limitations of data analysis methods including the use of software. Finally, you evaluate some of the reasons why technology may not be a panacea to all the problems of manual data analysis but, rather, a source of new challenges.

For this Discussion, consider this week’s Resources. Think about your personal experiences with data collection software, even if it was not related to community health assessment, and think about some of the challenges it posed.

With these thoughts in mind:

Post 4 pages of your answer to one of the following:

• Explain one benefit and one limitation for using software-assisted quantitative data analysis in the preparation of a community health assessment report and justify your response, or
• Explain one benefit and one limitation for using software-assisted qualitative data analysis in the preparation of a community health assessment report and justify your response.
• Finally, describe one method for data analysis for which you would not use software and explain why.