Unit 5: Research Data
5.1 Meaning, Importance and Sources of Data
Data = the research’s raw material — the facts, texts, figures and observations collected to answer the question. Importance: the hypothesis’s food (no data, no test), the conclusion’s warrant (the evidence’s chain), and the report’s body (the reader’s audit trail). The sources’ map (the legal researcher’s two streets): the documentary (the statutes, the NKP reports, the court records, the Nepal Gazette, the reports of the constitutional bodies — the CIAA-and-NHRC annual reports, the statutes-and-ordinances’ record) and the field (the interviews, the questionnaires, the observation — Unit 3’s yield); the official statistics (the police’s crime figures, the prison statistics, the court’s own case-flow data — with the dark-figure caveat of Criminology, this semester); and the archives-and-databases (the decisions’ online repositories, the gazettes’ digitisation, the theses’ repositories).
5.2 Qualitative and Quantitative Data
Quantitative data = the numbers’ world — the counts, the rates, the scales (the case-disposal statistics; the delay’s days; the Likert scores). Analysis’s faces: the descriptive (the frequencies, the percentages, the means-and-medians), the cross-tabulations (the groups’ comparison), and the inferential (the correlation-and-significance tests — used with the legal researcher’s humility). Qualitative data = the meaning’s world — the words, the narratives, the observed behaviour (the judges’ accounts, the victims’ stories, the courtroom’s texture). Analysis’s faces: the coding-and-themes (the transcriptions’ disciplined reading), the discourse-and-content analysis (the judgments’ language — the doctrinal-empirical bridge), the narrative synthesis. The mixed-methods wisdom (the exam’s conclusion): the numbers show the what and how much; the words show the why and how — the socio-legal study typically needs both (the survey’s breadth + the interview’s depth; the QUAL-QUAN’s triangulation).
5.3 Primary and Secondary Authorities
The legal-research world’s own data-ladder (the doctrinal’s gold standard):
| Class | Meaning | Legal examples |
|—|—|—|
| Primary
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