Data Literacy: An Introduction

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What is data literacy and why should you care?

Data literacy is the ability to read data, write and work with data, and communicate data in proper context. 

• Reading data effectively means making sense of quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative data are numerical data such as an average number of something and qualitative data gathers non-numerical data from sources such as interviews, focus groups. 
• Working with data is collecting and organizing data for analysis. The right data can be a useful tool to add to your research paper to strengthen your point. 
• Communicating findings: includes presenting and applying the information in an useful way. When you have the right data and use it appropriately, you can make a better informed decision in both your personal and professional lives. 

Why should you care about data literacy? When you do a Google search on a topic, it presents results and not just good and factual results. Anyone can post and manipulate data. We are constantly inundated with information from social media and news sources from climate change to presidential elections. Knowing what that data means can be the difference in which initiative to support. Researchers and media can lie or mislead with statistics with selective bias, a small sample size that generalized to represent a much larger and more diverse group, and faulty cause and effect. Developing data literate skills helps you avoid being mislead with statistics.