anikarenina
Data Collection
My thesis research involves collecting information about the PhD degrees of I-Schools' faculty. This data mining is quite time-consuming; Georgia Tech has 80 faculty that meet my sampling criteria, UCLA had 66, and that's two out of nineteen. Not all schools have the same quantity or quality of information about their faculty's educational pedigree available online so in some cases the additional information, such as year of PhD and department granting the degree, are found in the UMI Dissertation Abstracts database, but there are still some blanks to fill in. Everything here was collected by hand from public sources under IRB exemption.
Before the advent of the Internet, this information would have been collected by survey or through a published directory for an academic field (nonexistant for this community). Biases in web-collected data of this nature exist, but are a lesser evil compared to the biases of other methods that are subject to problems with response rate and/or significant time lag to publication.
Data Collection
My thesis research involves collecting information about the PhD degrees of I-Schools' faculty. This data mining is quite time-consuming; Georgia Tech has 80 faculty that meet my sampling criteria, UCLA had 66, and that's two out of nineteen. Not all schools have the same quantity or quality of information about their faculty's educational pedigree available online so in some cases the additional information, such as year of PhD and department granting the degree, are found in the UMI Dissertation Abstracts database, but there are still some blanks to fill in. Everything here was collected by hand from public sources under IRB exemption.
Before the advent of the Internet, this information would have been collected by survey or through a published directory for an academic field (nonexistant for this community). Biases in web-collected data of this nature exist, but are a lesser evil compared to the biases of other methods that are subject to problems with response rate and/or significant time lag to publication.