Understanding Data Types: Qualitative and Quantitative Explained

so the next part of collecting data is something that's a recap from gcse it's just to do with different types of

data and you need to know how to be able to classify different kinds of information

that you might be gathering now i've done it as a bit of a flow diagram so you start at the top part of

this diagram the first thing that you need to do you need to decide

is if something is qualitative which means it's categorical or if something is quantitative

qualitative the beginning of this word looks like the word quality and you might say like what was

the quality like of uh how would you describe something what was its quality

and you normally use non-numerical things like that so the quality of something could be its color

you'll notice that this word starts with quantity or quantitative and quantity is how you would measure

how many things there are of something so this would be like a numerical value that's what it would be for quantitative

data then quantitative quantitative data it's very difficult to say with

all the t's in there is numerical values that get split into two different kinds you then have discrete data and discrete

data can only take specific values like your shoe size or the number of children in a family

notice i've said shoe size here and i haven't said the size of your foot because the shoe

size you can go into the shop and you can only buy set shoe sizes whereas the size of your foot

is actually something that is continuous because it can take any decimal value and it's pos any decimal value that's

possible within a specified range so i've said here also know that while discrete variables only allow specific

values the range could still be infinite so it could be like the number of attempts before success on something

um doesn't have to be in a set range you could take an infinite number of times until you achieved success on a

particular game or whatever it would be so i've just got a few things down here that we're going to very briefly think

about what type of data they are because these are little one markers that will come up in your stats exam

it says eddie carries out a survey about the pet dogs his classmates own decide what type of data the following

are so make sure that first of all we decide whether it's one of these two and if it's quantitative you then have

to decide if it's discrete or continuous so how many dogs each person owns is what

discretes okay so it's going to be quantity quantitative quantitative and it's going to be

discrete pretty simple okay b says the color of the dogs which is

qualitative because it's being measured with words the type of dog

qualitative yeah qualitative forgive me for this being incredibly um boring

the name of each dog is okay the name of each dog no because it's not a numerical value

unless you've decided to name your dog 13 or 18 or something it's qualitative

and the age of each dog so this is why i'm not sure okay it's definitely quantitative

so it depends why do you think we are why do you think we might disagree on this

who was that was that proverb were you saying that this is um discrete why were you saying it's discreet

no because because i think it could be discreet it's like if i said to you amina how old are you okay 16 how old

are you how old am i 31 you just say like a discreet age

no one says i'm 16 years 7 months 3 days 5 hours 2.65 seconds so even though our like the time we've

been alive is continuous maybe the age of each dog is discrete i don't know

kind of depends on the context of what's happened here so this could be discrete or it could possibly be continuous

depending on what's actually being measured if we wanted the exact age of something

it's funny because when you talk to people about like babies and they say how old is the baby they don't say zero

or one they will say like oh three weeks old or and then suddenly it gets to a point

where you just say i'm 16. so it depends on the context of what's being asked here but i think the age of

each dog i think probably continuous i don't know i'm not sure the mass of each dog though

i'm pretty sure on this one is going to be quantitative and continuous

because although you would probably round the um the dog's weight it will have

an exact value it will need to be put into a group and i'm i'm kind of settling more

on the age of the dog being continuous rather than discrete i think discrete is probably how as

humans we describe it but in reality the age of the dog is a continuous measure

i think what do you think what would you go for i said i probably i'm gonna go with

continuous but it's up for debate and then the other thing that comes up in exercise one day

is some stuff to do with grouped data okay this is all stuff you know from gcse so i'm not going to ask us to do

this in class can have a look at our homework but you might have group data that looks

like this in a table and i've said that data can be grouped for conciseness

at the expense of losing the exact original values this means if you put data into groups

you don't have access to what the original values actually were so this one that i've got

down here this this group that i've got it's actually not called a group it's known

as a class interval so you need to be familiar with the term class interval

referring to this particular description that we've got you also need to know that the bottom

number is the lower class boundary the top number is the upper class boundary

and to find the midpoint how do you find the midpoint of two numbers you just add them get the total and

divide it by two so the midpoint of this is going to be 45 and you also need to know that the class

width is how wide that group is again pretty obvious so it's going to be 70 take away 20 so

the gap between them which is 50. so the class width of this is 50. and just kind of break down what

this is actually saying is that the weights of let's think we're talking about the dogs in the previous

example it's saying that the weights of the dogs are between 20 kilograms they could be

equal to 20 kilograms but they have to be less than 70 kilograms and that's just how the class intervals

work so you're going to just do at home you're going to do exercise 1d and think about the different kinds of

things to do with different types of data and grouped data as well