What is QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS? What is it for?

What is the first thing that comes to mind when we see data? The first instinct is to find
patterns, connections, and relationships. We look at the data to find meaning in it.

Similarly, in research, once data have already been collected, the next step is to get insights from
it. For example, if a clothing brand is trying to identify the latest trends among young women,
the brand will first reach out to young women and ask them questions relevant to the research
objective. After collecting this information, the brand will analyze that data to identify patterns
— for example, it may discover that most young women would like to see more variety of jeans.

Data analysis is how researchers go from a mass of data to meaningful insights. There are
many different data analysis methods, depending on the type of research. Here are a few methods
you can use to analyze quantitative data.

Analyzing Quantitative Data

Data Preparation

The first stage of analyzing data is data preparation, where the aim is to convert raw data into
something meaningful and readable. It includes four steps:

Step 1: Data Validation

The purpose of data validation is to find out, as far as possible, whether the data collection was
done as per the pre-set standards and without any bias. It is a four-step process, which includes…

1. Fraud, to infer whether each respondent was actually interviewed or not.

2. Screening, to make sure that respondents were chosen as per the research criteria.
3. Procedure, to check whether the data collection procedure was duly followed.
4. Completeness, to ensure that the interviewer asked the respondent all the questions, rather
than just a few required ones.

To do this, researchers would need to pick a random sample of completed surveys and validate
the collected data. (Note that this can be time-consuming for surveys with lots of responses.) For
example, imagine a survey with 200 respondents split into 2 cities. The researcher can pick a
sample of 20 random respondents from each city. After this, the researcher can reach out to them
through email or phone and check their responses to a certain set of questions just to verify if
their answers will really match with the data that they provided in the questionnaire.

Step 2: Data Editing

Typically, large data sets include errors. For example, respondents may fill fields incorrectly or
skip them accidentally. To make sure that there are no such errors, the researcher should conduct
basic data checks, check for outliers, and edit the raw research data to identify and clear out any
data points that may hamper the accuracy of the results.

For example, an error could be fields that were left empty by respondents. While editing the data,
it is important to make sure to remove or fill all the empty fields.

Step 3: Data Coding

This is one of the most important steps in data preparation. It refers to grouping and assigning
values to responses from the survey.

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For example, if a researcher has interviewed 1,000 people and now wants to find the average age
of the respondents, the researcher will create age brackets and categorize the age of each of the
respondent as per these codes. (For example, respondents between 13-15 years old would have
their age coded as 0, 16-18 as 1, 18-20 as 2, etc.)

Then during analysis, the researcher can deal with simplified age brackets, rather than a massive
range of individual ages.

After these steps, the data is ready for analysis. The two most commonly used quantitative data
analysis methods are descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. In this module, we will just
talk about descriptive statistics.

Quantitative Data Analysis Methods

Descriptive Statistics

Typically, descriptive statistics (also known as descriptive analysis) is the first level of analysis.
It helps researchers summarize the data and find patterns. A few commonly used descriptive
statistics are:

Mean: numerical average of a set of values.

Median: midpoint of a set of numerical values.

Mode: most common value among a set of values.

Percentage: used to express how a value or group of respondents within the data relates to a
larger group of respondents.

Frequency: the number of times a value is found.

Range: the highest and lowest value in a set of values.

NOTE: For you to understand how these statistical concepts are being used in actual research
and for you to know how tabular and graphical presentations of data are being done for data
analysis, kindly open and study the file that will be sent in our chat group.

Descriptive statistics provide absolute numbers. However, they do not explain the rationale or
reasoning behind those numbers. Before applying descriptive statistics, it is important to think
about which one is best suited for your research question and what you want to show. For
example, a percentage is a good way to show the gender distribution of respondents.

Descriptive statistics are most helpful when the research is limited to the sample and does not
need to be generalized to a larger population. For example, if you are comparing the percentage
of children vaccinated in two different villages, then descriptive statistics is enough.

Since descriptive analysis is mostly used for analyzing single variable, it is often called
univariate analysis.

Video-graphed Discussion: Now that you are done with the module’s lecture, you may already
open and watch the video-graphed discussion that I prepared for this week, which is saved on
your OTG flash drive, particularly inside the “Video-graphed Discussions” folder. Its file name
is “Lesson 3 for Quarter 2”.

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Brain Teaser: Do you know that the social media apps that you are using such as Facebook &
Twitter are actually doing a non-stop data analysis every day? The social media apps are always
observing the patterns of our social media activities. They monitor everything that we do in our
accounts. They keep a record of the pages, groups, articles, and sites that we usually follow, visit,
read, engage with, or react to for them to know our SOCIAL MEDIA FOOTPRINT. Our social
media footprint summarizes our usual behavior. It gives the social media app managers an idea
about what we prefer to see as we browse the web. And they are using it to customize our online
experience. They are using our social media footprint to control what will appear on our social
media feeds. (Main Idea: what we usually like, open, view, watch, read, engage with, or react to
are the ones that will keep on appearing on our feeds.)

Focus Questions: Let us now try to check if you have really absorbed the core concepts and
ideas of our lesson for this week. Try to mentally answer the following guide questions, which
will help you assess your learning progress. If you can already answer these questions, it means
that you succeeded in your learning journey. If not, try reading again the module’s lecture or try
watching again our video-graphed discussion so that you may soon be able to answer these
questions on your own.
1. What is data analysis for?
2. What is quantitative data analysis?
3. How can a data analysis be accurate?
4. What are the methods for quantitative data analysis.

Illustrations and Examples: