Types of Data + descriptive statistics

Question 1

Quantitive data

Answer 1

Quantitative data involves numbers and can be measured objectively.

It is immediately quantifiable. Quantitative data includes;
- The dependent variable in an experiment.
- Closed questions in questionnaires.
- Structured interviews
- A tally of how many times a behavioural category is seen in an observation.

Question 2

Qualitative data

Answer 2

Qualitative data involves words and the data is based on the subjective interpretation of language. It is only quantifiable if the data is put into categories and the frequency is counted.

Qualitative data includes;
- Open questions in questionnaires.
- A transcript from an unstructured interview.
- Researchers describing what they see in an observation.

Question 3

challenges to qualitative data

Answer 3

• challenging to analyse because it relies on interpretation by the researcher, which could be inaccurate, subjective or even biased.
• Furthermore, qualitative data may not be easy to categorise/collate into a sensible number of answer types. The researcher could be left with lots of individual responses that cannot be summarised.

Question 4

primary data

Answer 4

Primary data is collected directly by the researcher for the purpose of the investigation.

Question 5

secondary data

Answer 5

• 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.

However, there is substantial variation in the quality and accuracy of secondary data
= it can be hard for researchers to know how reliable secondary data is.

Question 6

meta-analysis

Answer 6

• 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
  = results can be generalised across much larger populations.
• However, meta-analysis may be prone to publication bias
• the researcher may choose to leave out studies with negative or non-significant results.

Question 7

measures of central tendency

Answer 7

• mean
• mode
• standard deviation

Question 8

measures of dispersion

Answer 8

• range

- median

Question 9

percentages

Answer 9

need percentage change