Before you begin the data gathering process, you must first decide how to conduct your research, what observations to make, what questions to ask, and how to be certain that your process is unbiased.

Ensure that all data collection activities, be they primary data collection or secondary data review, are consistent with responsible, ethical, principled and human-rights based approaches to data ...

The sociologist, therefore, knows exactly how the data was collected, by whom and for what purpose (you don’t, for example, have to trust other people if they collected their data accurately). As we ...