What is quantitative data?
Data often comes in the form of numbers.
Types of quantitative data
Many different things can be measured in fieldwork, for example the The speed of an object in a particular direction. of a river, the number of cars or the amount of litter in a particular location.
Litter counts are quantitative data
Numbers can also appear in other forms:
- Nominal data - these are numbers that appear as categories, eg 1 = yes and 2 = no.
- Ordinal data - these numbers have an order, eg the rank order of cities by population size. It is known that city 1 is more populated than cities 2 and 3, but it is not known how many more people there are, as the spacing between each city is not equal.
- Interval data - these numbers are similar to ordinal, but the difference between each number is equal, eg temperature is measured in degrees centigrade.
- Ratio data - this is when there is a relationship between two sets of numbers, eg the number of people per doctor.