Lesson 13 - Types of Data

Question 1

Quantitative Data

Answer 1

Involves numbers and can be measured objectively

Immediately quantifiable

Question 2

Quantitative Data Includes

Answer 2

The DV in an experiment
Closed questions in questionnaires
Structured interviews
A tally of how many times a behavioural category is seen in an observation

Question 3

Qualitative Data

Answer 3

Involves words and the data is based on the subjective interpretation of language
Only quantifiable if the data is put into categories and the frequency is counted

Question 4

Qualitative Data Includes

Answer 4

Open questions in questionnaires
A transcript from an unstructured interview
Researchers describing what they see in an observation

Question 5

Qualitative Data Analysis

Answer 5

Difficult to analyse as it relies on interpretation by researcher
Interpretation may be inaccurate, subjective or biased
May not be easy to categories/collate into a sensible number of answer types
The researcher could be left with lots of individual responses that cannot be summarised

Question 6

Primary Data

Answer 6

Collected directly by the researcher for the purpose of the investigation

Question 7

Secondary Data

Answer 7

Information that was collected for a purpose other than the current use
Researcher could use data collected by them but for a different study, or collected by a different researcher
When desired research already exists, there is no need to conduct more research
However, there is substantial variation in the quality and accuracy of secondary data and it can be hard for researchers to know how reliable it is

Question 8

Meta Analysis

Answer 8

Refers to the process of combining results from a number of studies on a particular topic (secondary data) to provide an overall view
Allows us to view data with much more confidence and results can be generalised across much larger populations
However it can be prone to publication bias; researcher may choose to leave out studies with negative or insignificant results