Again, a medical analogy may be useful here: it is saying that a medical doctor's job is to collect diverse measurements, such as blood pressure, body temperature, blood and urine lab tests, and so on. What is commonly understood to be statistical data is only one of the statistician?s raw materials. However the main job is not data collection in itself, but identifying what data are relevant for the matter at hand, how to collect them and then how to transform them into useful information.