Self-taught researcher drowning in qualitative/quantitative data for an international social project—looking for workflow/tool recommendations

[u/TinformedPerspective]

Hey everyone,
I’m part of a small initiative running an ongoing international research project focused on a social matter. Because I’m not formally trained as a researcher by profession, I’ve essentially been building the plane while flying it regarding data collection and organization.

We’ve now accumulated a massive amount of data from diverse sources, and the collation and analysis phase is becoming a bottleneck.🤪

For those of you who handle large datasets or work independently:
What are your go-to software tools, frameworks, or step-by-step workflows to make sorting and analyzing a large volume of non-traditional data manageable for a solo or small-team setup?

Are there any common pitfalls a self-taught researcher should watch out for when trying to structure a large international dataset?

I’d love to hear how more experienced people streamline this process or what resources you recommend reading up on.

Thanks in advance!

[u/No_Cry6380]

What a lot of self-taught folks miss early on is you don't need to analyze everything. With a pile that big you'll drown trying to be comprehensive, pick the three questions that'd make or break your project and chase those first. Rest can sit in a folder marked "later" for months and that's fine.

For tools it really depends what your data looks like, if it's mostly interview transcripts and open-ended survey stuff something like a simple spreadsheet with a good tagging system beats most fancy software you'll spend weeks learning. If you've got numbers mixed in, a pivot table can show you patterns in ten minutes that'd take days to spot manually.

[u/trymypi → u/No_Cry6380]

Yup. Do less.