4 Understanding your data

Before beginning with your analysis, it is good practice to make sure that you understand the basic characteristics of the data that you will be working with, and for this several steps are necessary and detailed in the following sections:

This section is divided into 4 sub-sections:

• 4.1 Checking the metadata,
• 4.2 Recognizing basic data types,
• 4.3 Using basic descriptive statistics,
• 4.4 Looking for relations between variables.