When students of the social sciences have designed their research ideas, they often wonder how they are going to collect data. Social science projects require a lot of data, and it is not easy collecting all of it. Of course, many of these projects are done by teams of people and once they coordinate in a group then the task becomes easy. If an individual alone has to collect a lot of data then it might be wise for him or her to reduce the scope of the study lest they are not able to get enough information from enough people.
In case the survey is being done in teams then it is a good idea to split the survey geography into different parts. Each part should target an equal number of respondents and each member would be responsible for collecting data from those respondents. The team also has to factor in the possibility that many of these respondents might not answer. Sampling error should be given serious thought in such cases.
It should be remembered that the team also has to analyse this data afterwards. So it is a good idea to keep the variables simple. It is always easy to understand the correlation between a few variables than many. When the research methodology is being designed then it would be helpful if the division of the survey was also done so that each sample is comparatively homogenous in nature. Then the stress on the surveyors and the work of the analysts becomes less.
Excel files or databases can be used to store the data. Statistical applications like STATA accept many kinds of input formats. The data can be loaded into the applications and broken down for further analysis. Different team members can also be assigned different tasks when it comes to analysis of the data so that the meanings are deciphered quickly.