One of life’s’ burning questions, what came first, the chicken or the egg? In a lecture with Richard we discussed statistical information and data analysis, and the same premise from the question above became applied to our discussion.

Do you record the data first, or do you interpret the data first?

Similarly, this seemed to be a question which had no answer, much like the idea of the chicken and the egg, but does it have an answer?

Some may argue that you have to have data recorded in order to be able to clearly interpret that data. For example, if you were measuring how many brown haired people were in a room in comparison to blond, it would be hard to interpret this data without the exact numbers presented in ‘black and white’. The interpretation of this data would not be accurate without the information being recorded.

Others would argue the case that you have to have an understanding of the data before you record it. There has to be an interpretation of the data to determine its worthiness of being recorded.

This question is a conundrum, similarly to the chicken and the egg, there is no definitive answer. Whether recording or interpreting happens first is different in any situation. It also depends what is meant by the word interpret, does it refer to an understanding of the concept which you are investigating or an interpretation of the data presented by the concept.

This relates to Liping Ma’s idea of basic concepts. We are not simply looking at recording and interpreting data but the reasons behind why we use these processes. We are looking into the structure behind data analysis, and gaining a greater understanding, not simply the use of it as a process.