Not all research projects require a database. However there are a series of data characteristics that suggest that building a database would be a good idea.
If you would answer yes to two or more of the following questions, it may be a good idea to look into relational databases:
- Does more than one person have to do data entry at the same time?
- Do you often find yourself copy/pasting data in your spreadsheet?
- Do you usually have more than one tab/spreadsheet open and often have to move data from one to the other?
- Do you have so much data that it is difficult to manage?
- Do you sometimes discover data entry errors and wonder how/when they happened?
