The Practice of Social Research

Chapter Fourteen.  Quantitative Data Analysis

QUANTIFICATION OF DATA
    Developing code Categories
    Codebook Construction
    Data Entry

In Chapter 13, you saw that coding was a key activity in qualitative data processing.  Now, you will learn it also often figures into the quantification of data for quantitative analysis.  You'll see that some of the early logic of coding applies here, but the intended use of the coding is different.  We'll see how to develop code categories for quantitative analysis.

A codebook is a critical document in quantitative analysis: listing all the variables in the data set and the numerical assignments given to the attributes comprising those variables.

Finally, this section will examine some of the alternative ways of getting coded data into a "machine-readable" format to support computer analysis.