Consider ethical dimensions of your research and, if necessary, get approval from your school’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB. You should be sensitive to any ethical issues your research raises....

Consider ethical dimensions of your research and, if necessary, get approval from your school’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB. You should be sensitive to any ethical issues your research raises. In addition, any research project involving people will likely have to be reviewed by your school’s IRB, which will want to make sure, for example, that all participants will provide informed consent. 5. Collect, analyze, and interpret the data. Finally, you are ready to administer your survey. Afterward, you must enter the resulting data in a computer using a software package that will allow you to analyze it. Your analysis could range from simple summaries of the responses (for example, 42 percent of respondents voted in the last election) to comparisons between groups (for example, similarities and differences in the amount of charity work done by voters and nonvoters) or more complex analyses of the relationship between the variables. Once your data analysis is complete, you will need to summarize what you have found. The conclusions to be drawn from data are not self-evident, however; data must be interpreted in light of theoretical or substantive questions. How does your evidence apply to the question you raised originally? What have you learned about the relationship between voting and service or charity work? Has your hypothesis been confirmed? Do your findings have any bearing on theories in this field?