- Data types are at the core of understanding data
- Understanding data is critical when analysing your results
- Data types dictate:
- How to verify and validate data
- How to normalise data
- how to analysis data
- How to display data
- Often they are labelled as:
- Numerical or Continuous data
- Discrete – count the number of items
- Continuous – a measurement (cm, km, litres, kg, etc…)
- Categorical is grouped data:
- Male or female
- Between 0-15, 16-30 etc…
- Ordinal or rating
- Typically treated as categorical data
Why is data types so important?
- By knowing the data type you know what test you can use
- In statistics this is critical
- Using the wrong test will give you the wrong answer
- The wrong answer will lead to the wrong conclusion
- This means the second half of your report is wrong = FAIL!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_data_type
