How do you make sure your data is accurate?

Question: How do you make sure your data is accurate?
- Keywords:
  accurate,
  data,
  experiments
Asked by to Claire, Elizabeth, Manolis, Mark, Zach on 14 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
- Mark Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2014:
  
  You do the experiment lots of times. Doing that, and knowing some maths you can usually say precisely how confident you are in the result you get.
- Zach Dixon answered on 14 Mar 2014:
  
  Like Mark said, it’s all about repetition!
  
  But another way is to address the same question using many different experimental techniques. If many different types of experiment give the same conclusion we can be more confident of it!
- Claire Vinten answered on 14 Mar 2014:
  
  This is a very good questions – because if you tell everyone you have made a discovery, but they think your data is not accurate you will look a bit silly!
  
  I make sure my data is accurate by getting a second person to check it. For example, I will conduct and interview and then try and pick out what the people in the interview were talking about. When I have done this, I will ask someone else to pick out what they think the interviewee was talking about. Then we will compare – if we think the same then we can be happy that the data is accurate. If we don’t think the same, then it’s back to the drawing board!!
- Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 14 Mar 2014:
  
  Another way we can look to see if our experiments are accurate is to test lots of different combinations of the factors we are interested in, to build up a clearer picture of how these factors interact and see where the boundaries are i.e when does the experiment start to flop! This allows us to create whats called a design space – we can then do further smaller repeat experiments inside the design space. This helps if you have experiments where it takes a long time to get repeats or if you are trying to improve the experiment

Question: How do you make sure your data is accurate?

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