RM- Types of data

Question 1

What is nominal (discrete) data?

Answer 1

Data are in seperate categories, e.g grouping people to their favourite TV show or eyecolour

Question 2

What is ordinal data (continuous) data?

Answer 2

Data are ordered in some way e.g asking people to make a list of music genres in order of liking

Question 3

What is interval data?

Answer 3

Data is measured using units of equal intervals.

- E.g how stressed are you on a scale of 1-10

Question 4

What is quantitative data?

Answer 4

• Data that represents how much, how long or how many etc. there are of something.
• Data is measured in numbers of quantities

Question 5

What are advantages of quantitative data?

Answer 5

1) Easier to analyse than qualitative data, so comparisons, trends and patterns can be easily drawn.
2) Data is more objective and less open to bias than qualitative data.

Question 6

What are disadvantages of quantitative data?

Answer 6

1) lacks detail

2) collected artificially

Question 7

What is qualitative data?

Answer 7

• Data that cannot be counted or quantified.

- It is in the form of information which is lengthy and has a lot of detail.

Question 8

What are advantages of qualitative data?

Answer 8

1) Can gain lots of detailed data which will help you appreciate the complexity of human behaviour hence high in external validity as it provides investigator with more meaningful insight into ppt worldview

Question 9

What are disadvantages of qualitative data?

Answer 9

1) Data is usually unreliable so if it was to be repeated in the future, it would be unlikely that same results would be gained.
2) You may be quite subjective when you analyse the detail so it would be difficult to generalise and make conclusions.

Question 10

What is primary data?

Answer 10

• Primary data is information observed or collected directly from first-hand experience.
• It is collected by the researcher for the study currently being undertaken.

Question 11

What is secondary data?

Answer 11

• Information that was collected for another purpose.
• The researcher could use data collected by another researcher but for a different study.
• often subject to statistical testing and therefore significance is known.
  E.g a researcher might make use of mental health statistics collected by the NHS

Question 12

What is meta-analysis?

Answer 12

This refers to the process of combining results from a number of studies on a particular topic to provide an overall view.