What are Qualitative and Quantitative Data?
Qualitative and Quantitative data
What are qualitative and quantitative data?
Quantitative
Measures, quantities, numeric values, statistics
- Examples are
- Numbers of people attending training sessions (output)
- Numbers of compost toilets built (output)
- Amount of food produced (outcome)
- Hours spent doing various activities by women (outcome)
- Number of people who practice a behaviour (outcome)
- Amount of food or food groups consumed (outcome/ impact)
- Number of food groups consumed (outcome/ impact)
- Households with adequate sanitation and water (outcome)
- Number of children suffering from diarrhoea in the past 2 weeks (outcome/ impact)
Qualitative
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- ideas opinions, words, meanings, experiences, observation,
- Pile sorts, ranking methods
- Other visual tools such as maps
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- Examples are:
- Did you breastfeed your child, if so when did you stop breastfeeding completely?
- What do you see as advantages of breastfeeding?
- What are some of the challenges to exclusive breastfeeding?
- What do you see as the most important foods for a child aged 6 months to 2 years?
- How has your Permaculture project helped you to save time or remove the drudgery of work?
Different uses are made of quantitative and qualitative data. When starting out on your MEL system it might be useful to carry out some qualitative surveys before designing a quantitative survey.