10.01 Types of data
Are you ready?
Think about the responses you could get if you asked the following questions:
| How old are you? | What month were you born in? |
| How many pets do you have? | What animals do you have as pets? |
| How long does it take you to get to school each day? | Do you travel by car to school each day? |
Is there a difference in the type of answer you would get to the questions on the left from the ones on the right?
The answers to some questions are numbers and other questions have answers that are words.
Categorical data
This video explores categorical data.
Examples
Example 1
All the students in your school take a survey with the four questions below.
Which of the following questions will have categorical data as their results?
Categorical data means we ask questions that have words (or numbers that can't be used to perform mathematical operations) as their answers.
Numerical data
This video explores numerical data.
Examples
Example 2
Which of the following are numerical data?
If we ask questions where the answers are numbers, and we can perform mathematical operations on them, this is numerical data.