If you are serious about producing high quality research results, then you need to plan ahead. The time to plan is before you start your research, not afterward. However, going through things backward once or twice is usually a great motivator for doing things right in the future.
Here are the documents that you should minimally expect to produce in a well-planned research program:
| Research Proposal | Lays out the suggested course of research. |
| Study Protocol | Describes how a study is going to be conducted. |
| Data Collection Tools | The forms or files that will be used to collect the data. |
| Statistical Analysis Plan | Describes the plan for the statistical analysis. |
| Master Data | The final form of the data transferred from the data collection tools. |
| Analysis Data | Data derived from the master data after cleaning and normalization. |
| Statistical Code | Programs or scripts used to carry out the analysis against the analysis data. |
| Statistical Analysis | The output from statistical packages or statistical code. |
| TLG | Tables, listings, and graphs created by statistical packages or statistical code. |
| Analysis Notes | Describe analysis choices and decisions. |
| Manuscript | The actual manuscript using the statistical analysis material. |
| Reviewer Comments | The helpful comments from various reviewers. |
| Reviewer Response | Documented responses to reviewer comments. |
| Final Manuscript | Dissertation, thesis, or published work. |
Now, this might seem like overkill for a graduate student. But, if you think about it, you are going to be covering all of these items either explicitly or implicitly! It is always going to be better if you explicitly consider each item and plan accordingly. The item itself might be a single sheet of paper, or even a simple e-mail or paragraph, but it still needs to be considered.
Also, you are going to be spending years of your life in this course of research as well as oodles of money. You will be working with a minimum of your committee, but may also be working with dozens or hundreds of other people to carry out the studies that form your research program. You simply cannot afford to hope that everything will just work out by itself, or that someone else will hold your hand for you the whole way through so that everything goes well.
My point is this: You are not going to be doing any extra work by thinking through each of these items, planning a bit, and writing down your resulting thoughts. On the contrary, I believe that you are actually going to be saving yourself quite a bit of time and potentially stress and grief!
Actually, the more you work ahead and plan, the easier it is to carry out the tasks that you have to do now. So, if you can think through your Statistical Analysis Plan in advance, it will help you to design your data collection tools and to clarify your Study Protocol. You will be able to clearly identify the questions that you can actually answer with these data, which will help you formulate your research hypotheses much more realistically and defensibly. If you have to formally present a Research Proposal, this will pay off even in terms of reducing stress and enhancing your credibility.