Now's it time to go and find data to answer your question.

We'll focus on our own example question but you can use the same techniques for your own question.

Our question: How much financial support did the US government give to banks and other companies during the financial crisis of 2008-2009?

In locating relevant data you have two options

• Use a standard web search engine like Google, Yahoo etc
• Go directly to a specific service that allows you to search data relevant to your topic. For example if you know what you are looking for is likely to be in government statistics you can go directly to your official statistics agency site. Alternatively you can go to a dedicated data catalog like http://ckan.net/.

We usually recommend option 1 because a search on a generic engine will usually find datasets in more specific systems.

So in our case, we'll begin with a search on google:

"US government bailout data"

This quickly shows that the Federal Reserve and US government has released official data.