Qualitative vs Quantitative, They are two of the types of data one can collect in an analysis. Quantitative data comes mainly from close-ended questions and tends to be useful in a statistic study where the number of a specific answer is more important. Qualitative data comes more from open questions and answers that must have an additional study/interpretation to become useful.
Reflection on the Topic
I found these two interesting because of how I’ve encountered them in the past. For the most part, I see Quantitative, because I’ll take a survey or evaluation that asks me to rate something in a number. But last year I was involved in a small coding project at work and helped a co-worker go through and get open responses to a new program he was building, that was more of a Qualitative study. To actually define them, I found that shmoop.com had a simple definitions for them that reads “Quantitative data is information about quantities; that is, information that can be measured and written down with numbers.“ and “Qualitative data is information about qualities; information that can’t actually be measured. ”.(Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008) It’s a good definition, but lets make a little more sense out of it by looking at a survey, in fact, lets look at the MGA student evaluation. It’s perfect because it has both types of data. They first part of the survey is a quantitative survey; it consists of a list that asks the same rather generic questions about subjects like teacher response times and class pacing, and gives you options to select from very good to very bad. This is a quantitative study, and might be analyzed by looking for the ratio of how many students thought the teacher had excellent response time to their emails. Then below that, the evaluation has an open comments section where a student can write what they please. This written data could be analyzed to perhaps find a common theme. This written bit is quantitative data.
My Thought
“Another interesting thing about these two data types is that one’s much easier to deal with than the other. It’s why so many surveys are quantitative. But as with pretty much everything, the easy way has it’s limits, and the harder qualitative data might give a new, better perspective that would have gone unnoticed and un-gatherable in the quantitative data.” (L. Spencer, 2018).
Reference List
Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). Probability and Statistics Qualitative v. Quantitative Data. Retrieved October 6, 2018, from https://www.shmoop.com/probability-statistics/qualitative-quantitative-data.html#
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