Читать книгу Analysing Quantitative Data - Raymond A Kent - Страница 10

In this chapter you will learn that:

 data are constructed rather than collected and result from a process of systematic record-keeping;

 records are created in a social, economic and political context and for purposes specific to individuals or groups within organizations;

 qualitative data consist of words, phrases, narrative, text and visual images, while quantitative data arise as numbers that result from the systematic capture of classified, ordered, ranked, counted or calibrated characteristics of a specified set of cases;

 all quantitative data have a structure that consists of cases, properties and values;

 the construction of data of any kind is likely to give rise to errors from various sources;

 the dataset used throughout this text consists of 61 properties for 920 cases, but they do not constitute a random sample and there are many potential sources of error in the data.