How to collect research data for a thesis
Collect dissertation data with a consented, anonymous research survey: build the form, share a public link, and send responses straight to statistical analysis.
Empirical research has an awkward middle. You design the study carefully, you plan the analysis carefully, and in between, you collect research data in a generic form builder that knows nothing about consent, anonymity, or where the responses need to end up. Data Collection closes that gap: a research survey tool built into your project, sitting in the sidebar right before Data Analysis, because that's the order the work happens in.
1. Create the form, consent included
Open Data Collection and create a form. Every form starts with a participant-information and consent page. A research-grade template covering voluntariness, data use, and age confirmation is included, and you edit it to match your study. Respondents cannot reach question one without accepting: the ethics step is part of the instrument, not something you remember to paste in.
One honest caveat: a consent page doesn't replace ethics approval. Pair it with the ethics-application draft Data Analysis generates from your study design, and clear your protocol with your institution first.
2. Build the questions
Six question types cover most instruments: Likert scales, single and multiple choice, numbers, and short or long text, each with a required flag. Once you publish, the questions lock: editing a live instrument would quietly invalidate the responses you've already collected, so the tool simply won't let you.
3. Choose anonymity, and know what it means here
Most survey tools treat anonymity as a promise. Here it's structural: responses are stored as answers and a timestamp, and the database has no column for IP addresses or device data at all. There is nothing to switch off and nothing to leak. If your design needs identified responses, add identity questions to the form itself, declared to the respondent on the consent page, not captured silently.
4. Publish and share one link
Set a response limit (your plan sets the ceiling), publish, and share the public link. Respondents answer on any device with no account: consent, questions, thank-you, done. Behind the link, every submission is validated server-side against your question schema, the response limit is enforced atomically, bots are silently dropped, and rate limits guard the endpoint. You can close the form at any time.
5. Monitor, and export whenever you like
Responses appear in a live table in your project with a running counter against your limit. Export the full CSV at any moment. Your data is never locked in, and the export works in any statistics package if you prefer your own tooling.
6. One click to real statistics
The payoff: "Send to Data Analysis" turns your responses into a dataset in the same pipeline as a CSV upload: descriptives, t-tests, ANOVA, regression and more, computed by code and never guessed by a model. From there your findings flow into the Results chapter with the same verification as everything else you write. Open-text answers come along in the export, ready to paste into the qualitative coding path as transcripts.
For the analysis side of this journey, read "Dissertation statistics: CSV to Results chapter" next.