How to Break Down an Analysis

All people can learn to break down an analysis.

The ability to analyze a situation or a set of data is the essential critical thinking tool. Analysis should not be restricted to the world of academia, but used in everyday life to understand the world around us and to make good decisions. Rather than trust everything you come up against at first encounter, start using sets of data, things you observe and life experiences in order to draw important conclusions. Learning to use analysis in everyday life might sound difficult, but if you break down the process and use a series of steps to get underlying themes, you may surprise yourself with just how much you can uncover.

Instructions

1. 

   Data might appear in a graph or simply in your observations of the world around you.

   Look for a pattern in the data you are analyzing. This might include language usage patterns in a transcribed conversation, income patterns in a business spreadsheet or types of amino acids in a nutrient fact sheet.

2. Look for a way to generalize those patterns. For example, you might have found out that nine out of 10 people who see commercials for face cream feel more insecure about their faces, and also buy more face cream than those who have not seen the commercials. The generalization is that people who see commercials for face cream are much more likely to feel insecure about their faces and buy more face cream than those who do not.

3. Make inferences about your data. Your inferences are the conclusions you come up with by interpreting the data you have generalized. Inferences are the logical extrapolation of the generalization. Your inference about the face cream commercials may be that commercials use a person's malleable self-esteem to promote their products.

4. 

   Journaling can help greatly with evaluating findings.

   Evaluate your findings. You might do this by asking questions that come up after you've drawn some preliminary conclusions. In the example about the face cream commercials, some questions to use for evaluation include: Are these commercials ethical? Are they an effective advertising model? What could prevent these commercials from working?

5. 

   Discuss your analysis with people you trust.

   Question your entire analysis thus far. It is essential to ask yourself where you might have gone wrong in your data readings, generalization, evaluation and inferences. Ask yourself if personal biases came up. Find out if your data sources were reliable. Ask another person for another way to look at things. Even if you decide that the data and your analysis so far was without flaw, it is always worth seeking another opinion in order to tidy up rough spots in your analysis.

References

• University of Texas at San Antonio; Tomás Rivera Center for Student Success; How Do I Analyze a Reading?
• Purdue University; Purdue Online Writing Lab; Analysis
• Colorado State University: An Introduction to Content Analysis