5 Analysing the data
Once you have collected your information or data, you will need to analyse it in order to come up with recommendations for future law reform. There are a number of different ways you can analyse your data, and depending on the type of information you have available, you may need to use more than one form of analysis.
- Statistical evaluation involves examining the statistics or numbers you have collated, to see whether there are any relevant or significant patterns.
- Comparative evaluation is similar to statistical evaluation and involves comparing information from different places (such as different international laws, publicly available information from websites or responses to FOI requests) to establish patterns, casual relationships, or highlight differences.
- Thematic analysis involves establishing whether there are any themes in the information (e.g. existing analysis of the law from the literature review or responses to surveys or interviews).
- Process evaluation focuses on how well the law or regulation is being applied in practice and what can be done to improve this.
- Impact evaluation, in contrast to process evaluation, asks whether the law has achieved the intended impact as set out originally by the government, legislators or proposers of the law. To undertake this kind of evaluation, you need to establish what the desired impact of the law was originally, what the impact has been in practice on the target population, and whether this impact was intended or unintended.
- Cost–benefit analysis is a comparison of the cost of implementing the law compared to the benefits received from it. In practice, you are unlikely to carry out this type of evaluation in policy research.
The rest of this section will now focus on two of these types of analysis which may be new to you: statistical analysis and thematic analysis.