"Development Research in Practice: The DIME Analytics Data Handbook is intended to teach all users of development data how to handle data effectively, efficiently, and ethically. An empirical revolution has changed the face of development research over the last decade. Increasingly, researchers are working not just with complex data, but with original data—data sets collected by the research team itself or acquired through a unique agreement with a project partner. Research teams must carefully document how original data are created, handled, and analyzed. These tasks now contribute as much weight to the quality of the evidence as the research design and the statistical approaches do. At the same time, empirical research projects are expanding in scope and scale: more people are working on the same data over longer time frames. For that reason, the central premise of this book is that data work is a “social process,” which means that the many people on a team need to have the same ideas about what is to be done, when, where, and by whom so that they can collaborate effectively on a large, long-term research project." (Introduction)