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).