Data

Data are the recorded empirical observations on the cases under study, such as the annual percentage changes in the gross domestic product, the number of children in each family, scores on an attitude scale, fieldnotes from observing street gang behavior, or interview responses from old-age pensioners. Social scientists gather data from a wide variety of sources, including experiments, surveys, public records, historical documents, statistical yearbooks, and direct field observation. The recorded empirical observations can be qualitative as well as quantitative data. With quantitative data, the empirical observations are numbers that have intrinsic meaning, such as income in dollars. Qualitative data may be kept in text form, or assigned numerical codes, which may represent an efficient way to record and summarize them. For example, in an anthropological study, a researcher may record whether the market vendor brought produce to the market by cart, animal, motor vehicle, or hand. The researcher may go on to code these observations numerically, as follows: cart = 1, animal = 2, motor vehicle = 3, hand = 4. This coding facilitates storage of the information by computer. Increasingly, computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software is being used. Finally, it should be noted that the word data is plural.