Data Types: Qualitative vs Quantitative

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Quantitatve vs Qualitative

Quantitative data may be either discrete or continuous.

• Examples: Amount of money you have, Height, Weight, Number of people living in your town, Number of students who take statistics

• All data that are the result of counting are called quantitative discrete data. These data take on only certain numerical values. If you count the number of phone calls you receive for each day of the week, you might get values such as zero, one, two, or three.

• All data that are the result of measuring are quantitative continuous data assuming that we can measure accurately. Measuring angles in radians might result in such numbers as pi6,pi3,pi2,pi,3pi4pi6,pi3,pi2,pi,3pi4 , and so on. If you and your friends carry backpacks with books in them to school, the numbers of books in the backpacks are discrete data and the weights of the backpacks are continuous data.

Qualitative data are the result of categorizing or describing attributes of a population. Sometimes called as categorical data as well.

• Hair color, Blood type, Ethnic group, The car a person drives, The street a person lives on, zip code

• Data at the nominal level of measurement are qualitative. No mathematical computations can be carried out: Gender, race etc.

• Data at the ordinal level are variables with an ordered series such as Blood Group, Performance etc.