<h1>Not carefully developing a question to ask of your data</h1>

<p>As <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30737505#30737505">Scortchi</a> put it (his ellipsis):</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>[…] How can I analyze these data?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This quip exemplifies questions that describe a dataset and then ask what data-analytical, statistical, mathematical, programmatical, or machine-learning-ical tools to throw at the data—"What do I do with the data?"—without being reasonably specific about what the asker wants to achieve with data analysis. Data analysis is not a machine where you stick data in one end and get an APA-formatted results section out the other. It is a set of tools to help you answer questions about data. <strong>You need to decide on some questions to ask before the tools can do you any good</strong>.</p>

<p>To avoid this problem, try to do two things whenever you ask a question:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Provide <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3134/how-can-we-encourage-askers-to-provide-context">broader context</a>. Why are you looking at this data to begin with? What were you hoping to learn, at the big-picture level?</p></li>
<li><p>Focus your question enough to ask about a particular aspect of the data. Which variable (or variables) do you think of as the outcome? Are you interested in building a predictive model, identifying causes, summarizing a large dataset, searching for certain cases, or something else?</p></li>
</ol>
