Richter: There's two main ways to really look at research, and one is more of a quantitative approach. And that's the number drivers. If you're good at statistics or you know someone that's get at statistics, I think this is really great. There's free data sets out there. I mean, there's so much data that you can access for free or, if you have a budget, higher-level data sets that you can access, as well.
If you have someone that is really good, I know one individual who's in our field publishes 20, 30, many papers a year. Because he's proficient in statistics, he can take the same data set, run it three, four different times with different research questions in mind and very easily write up some documents about that. I think it's great. I think it's expedient.
But it's kind of like if I told you three out of four women may experience a completed sexual assault or attempted sexual assault in the course of their lifetime. Does that mean every woman? Does that mean specific woman, specific geographic areas, critical age periods? With a lot of the number stuff, we often don't have context there. And so it requires a really, really good analyst, when they're doing the writing, to provide the context for us.
The other way to get into that is more the qualitative. And that's an area that I absolutely love. It's interview based.
But it's sometimes very hard to quantate, to put in numerical form. But you do get that background, like why someone decided to drive drunk, or why does someone decide to start using drugs at the age of 10. I think that that's a really good supplement for the numbers.
And if you can do research that combines the two together, I think it's fantastic. The only problem is it's expensive. It's time consuming. There's a lot more hurdles with IRB because you really are asking people directly about things that might be personal or traumatic for them. So there's a lot of extra work on the front end.