For each of the products, there was a data collection aspect. This ranged from compiling information about crime statistics, surveys, and literature reviews to gain information relevant to each product. Before we got to the middle school in spring, we wanted to gauge just how much that crime affected the town of Alton. To do this, a couple of websites were checked to see how prevalent that crime was in town. We used this data to format some of the questions that we were going to ask on site. When we got to the middle school, in addition to just working with the kids, we also performed surveys, several restorative circles, and a few focus groups along the way. This helped to strengthen the stories the kids wanted to tell and provided ideas for audio and pictures that could be added over the kids talking to enhance the viewing experience. As stated earlier, surveys were also used to get a good idea of how engaged the students were with the project, in hopes to improve any digital storytelling experiences with CODES students in the future. The focus groups also helped in the creation of the digital storytelling guide, as some of the feedback went into making the different sections on the elements. In the same vain, the surveys also helped in the creation of some of the presentations that different members of the team made. Overall, the data collection for this research project mostly consisted of crime statistics, surveys, restorative circles, and focus groups.