Steps Towards Making a Project

A good project is built in an orderly way. Rather than plunging straight into collecting information, you move through a definite sequence of steps, each of which prepares the ground for the next. Skipping or reversing steps usually leads to data that do not fit the question, or to a report that cannot be defended. This section gives the roadmap; the sub-sections that follow explain each step in detail.

The steps towards making a project, in order, are:

1. Identifying a problem or an area of study. Decide clearly what you want to investigate. The objective you fix here governs everything that follows — the kind of data you need and the way you will process them.
2. Choice of the target group. Identify whom you will study — the specific set of people (or households, firms, etc.) whose responses are relevant to your objective. This choice shapes the questions you frame.
3. Collection of data. Decide how to gather information — by the primary method (first-hand, through a questionnaire or interview schedule), by the secondary method (already-published data), or by both — and then actually collect it.
4. Organisation and presentation of data. Process the raw responses by classifying and tabulating them and displaying them through suitable diagrams such as bar diagrams and pie diagrams.
5. Analysis and interpretation. Apply statistical tools — measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, and correlation — to find the average, the variability, and any relationship among the variables.
6. Conclusion. Draw meaningful conclusions from the analysis and, where possible, offer predictions and suggestions.
7. Bibliography. List all the secondary sources you consulted.

How the steps hang together. Notice that the sequence is logical, not arbitrary. The objective (step 1) tells you who is relevant (step 2); together they decide what data and which method of collection (step 3). Only once the data are in hand can they be organised and presented (step 4), which in turn makes analysis (step 5) possible. Analysis yields conclusions (step 6), and the bibliography (step 7) keeps the whole exercise honest and verifiable by acknowledging the sources used. …