  Performing ground-based submillimetre observations is a difficult task as the
measurements are subject to absorption and emission from water vapour in the
Earth's atmosphere and time variation in weather and instrument stability.
Removing these features and other artifacts from the data is a vital process
which affects the characteristics of the recovered astronomical structure we
seek to study. In this paper, we explore two data reduction methods for data
taken with the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array-2 (SCUBA-2) at the
James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The JCMT Legacy Reduction 1 (JCMT LR1)
and The Gould Belt Legacy Survey Legacy Release 1 (GBS LR1) reduction both use
the same software, Starlink, but differ in their choice of data reduction
parameters. We find that the JCMT LR1 reduction is suitable for determining
whether or not compact emission is present in a given region and the GBS LR1
reduction is tuned in a robust way to uncover more extended emission, which
better serves more in-depth physical analyses of star-forming regions. Using
the GBS LR1 method, we find that compact sources are recovered well, even at a
peak brightness of only 3 times the noise, whereas the reconstruction of larger
objects requires much care when drawing boundaries around the expected
astronomical signal in the data reduction process. Incorrect boundaries can
lead to false structure identification or it can cause structure to be missed.
In the JCMT LR1 reduction, the extent of the true structure of objects larger
than a point source is never fully recovered.
