qualitative data
Words, not numbers
Qualitative data describes qualities or characteristics rather than quantities—information that can't be reduced to numbers.
It includes interview responses, observations, images, and open-ended survey answers.
Researchers analyze qualitative data for patterns, themes, and meanings: The qualitative data revealed how participants felt about the program.
Contrasts with quantitative data, which deals in measurable amounts.
- social sciencesAcademic study of society
- subjectiveBased on personal perspective
- interviewsFormal evaluative conversations
- lived experienceKnowledge from personal participation
- market researchAnalyzing buyer preferences systematically
focus groups · descriptive · healthcare research · ethnography · field work · coding · field notes · visual analysis · word clouds · making sense · interpretative · case studies · anthropology · psychology · contextualized · sociology · thick description · exploratory
- Datadatasets, database, databases, databank, microdata
- fieldworkfieldwork, field work, field journal, field guide, field study
- academiaprofessors, universities, graduation cap, biology department, professor
- anthropologyanthropology, fieldwork, ethnography, social anthropology, cultural anthropology
- research methodsexperiment, hypothesis, deduction, experiments, induction
- research papersresearch paper, journal article, scholarly article, dissertation, original research
qualitative dataquantitative data
Numerically expressed information
statistical data · metrics · numbers · statistics · counts
qualitative dataquantitative research
Empirical study using numbers
statistical analysis · experimental data · survey data · psychometrics · econometrics
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