The name of the game for this week’s class was data gathering and analysis. We covered polling and surveys. I feel like this really started to scratch the surface of planning efforts as understanding how to collect and manage data to provide usable insights is key to the profession. We discussed methods for conducting surveys and observations, the importance of preparation for conducting site visits, and various data analysis tools. There were three programs which we reviewed, Qualtrics, Excel Data Analyst, and SPSS. My first impression is that I will gain a lot of utility from Qualtrics and Data Analyst. I’ve been very curious about to how to formulate and conduct a survey and Qualtrics seems like a powerful tool to be able to make surveys. As I am more familiar with Excel I feel more comfortable messing around with the Data Analysis add-in. I’d be interested is exploring SPSS but I feel I need to bone up on basic statistics which is a something I have a limited working knowledge with. In that respect I feel a bit apprehensive because I am unfamiliar with doing anything with statistics. Regardless I think many of these will be able to streamline the process of understanding data sets.