Quantitative vs Qualitative data - what's the

difference?
In short: quantitative means you can count it and it's numerical
(think quantity - something you can count). Qualitative means
you can't, and it's not numerical (think quality - categorical data
instead).
Boom! Simple, right?

There's one more distinction we should get straight before

moving on to the actual data types, and it has to do with
quantitative (numbers) data: discrete vs. continuous data.

Discrete data involves whole numbers (integers - like 1, 356, or 9)

that can't be divided based on the nature of what they are.
Like the number of people in a class, the number of fingers on
your hands, or the number of children someone has. You can't
have 1.9 children in a family (despite what the census might say).
Continuous data, on the other hand, is the opposite. It can be
divided up as much as you want, and measured to many decimal
places.
Like the weight of a car (can be calculated to many decimal
places), temperature (32.543 degrees, and so on), or the speed of
an airplane.

Now for the fun stuff.

Qualitative data types

Nominal data
Nominal data are used to label variables without any quantitative
value. Common examples include male/female (albeit somewhat
outdated), hair color, nationalities, names of people, and so on.
 In plain English: basically, they're labels (and nominal comes from
"name" to help you remember). You have brown hair (or brown
eyes). You are American. Your name is Jane.
Examples:

What color hair do you have?

 Brown
 Blonde
 Black
 Rainbow unicorn
What's your nationality?

 American
 German
 Kenyan
 Japanese
Notice that these variables don't overlap. For the purposes of
statistics, anyway, you can't have both brown and rainbow
unicorn-colored hair. And they're only really related by the main
category of which they're a part.

Ordinal data
The key with ordinal data is to remember that ordinal sounds like
order - and it's the order of the variables which matters. Not so
much the differences between those values.

Ordinal scales are often used for measures of satisfaction,

happiness, and so on. Have you ever taken one of those surveys,
like this?
 "How likely are you to recommend our services to your friends?"

 Very likely
 Likely
 Neutral
 Unlikely
 Very unlikely
See, we don't really know what the difference is between very
unlikely and unlikely - or if it's the same amount of likeliness (or,
unlikeliness) as between likely and very likely. But that's ok. We
just know that likely is more than neutral and unlikely is more
than very unlikely. It's all in the order.

Quantitative data types

Interval Data
Interval data is fun (and useful) because it's concerned with both
the order and difference between your variables. This allows you
to measure standard deviation and central tendency.
Everyone's favorite example of interval data is temperatures in
degrees celsius. 20 degrees C is warmer than 10, and the
difference between 20 degrees and 10 degrees is 10 degrees. The
difference between 10 and 0 is also 10 degrees.

If you need help remembering what interval scales are, just think
about the meaning of interval: the space between. So not only do
you care about the order of variables, but also about the values in
between them.
There is a little problem with intervals, however: there's no "true
zero." A true zero has no value - there is none of that thing - but 0
degrees C definitely has a value: it's quite chilly. You can also
have negative numbers.
If you don't have a true zero, you can't calculate ratios. This
means addition and subtraction work, but division and
multiplication don't.

Ratio data
Thank goodness there's ratio data. It solves all our problems.

Ratio data tells us about the order of variables, the differences

between them, and they have that absolute zero. Which allows all
sorts of calculations and inferences to be performed and drawn.

Ratio data is very similar interval data, except zero means none.
For ratio data, it is not possible to have negative values.

For instance, height is ratio data. It is not possible to have

negative height. If an object's height is zero, then there is no
object. This is different than something like temperature. Both 0
degrees and -5 degrees are completely valid and meaningful
temperatures.