Lecture 11

Basic data analysis for

quantitative research

Learning Objectives
1. Describe the process of conducting quantitative data analysis.

2. Understand the importance of data preparation.

3. Explain how descriptive statistics enable you to better understand your data.

4. Clarify how to identify and deal with outliers.

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 Process of quantitative data analysis
1. Review the conceptual framework and relationships to be
studied.
2. Prepare data for analysis.
3. Determine whether research involves descriptive analysis
or hypothesis testing.
4. Conduct analysis.
5. Evaluate findings to assess whether they are meaningful.

Data presentation
• Editing
– Inspect the data for its completeness and consistency.
– Problems:
• Incompleteness
• Inconsistency
• Branching questions: sequence followed?

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 Data presentation
• Missing data
– Due to data collection or data entry problems
– Missing data problem:
• How widespread?
• Whether systematic or random?
– Approaches to dealing with missing data
• Limited scope: Eliminate respondents/questions with a large proportion
of missing data points (15% or more)
• Nonmetric variables: eliminated.
• Metric variables: Replace missing values with the mean

Data presentation
• Coding
– Assigning numbers to answers
– Missing value  dots (.)
• Data entry
– Computer-assisted approach:
• Responses  database.
– Self-completed questionnaires:
• Scanning.
• Manually entered.

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 Data presentation
• Data transformation
– Changing the original form of the data to a new format.
– Number of categories.
• Point scale
– New variables
• Summated scores
• Average summated scores

Descriptive statistics
• Graphical summary
– Frequency distributions
– Bar charts
– Histograms
– Pie charts
– Line charts
• Measures of central tendency
– Mean; median; mode.
• Measures of dispersion
– Range; variance; standard deviation; skewness and kurtosis.

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 Frequency distributions
• Displaying the number of responses associated with each
value of a variable.

• Valid responses and missing data

• Frequency and percent

Bar charts
• Showing the data in the form of bars
– Constructed from the frequency distribution.
– Either horizontally or vertically
– Space between the bars

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 Histograms
• Vertical bar chart providing evidence of the shape of the
distribution for the variable.
– Constructed from the frequency distribution.
– No space between the bars
– Compared with the expected shape.

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Pie charts
• Display relative proportions of responses
– Each section of the pie is the relative proportion.
– Pie sections shown as percentages of the total area of the pie.

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 The normal distribution
• Symmetrical and bell shaped
– Within ± 3 SD’s from the mean: 99.7% of the values.
– Within ± 2 SD’s from the mean: 95% of the values.
– Within ± 1 SD from the mean: 68% of the values.
– Standard normal distribution
• Mean of 0; SD of 1
• Z values
z-score =

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Measures of central tendency

• Mean: the arithmetic average
∑ 𝑥
𝑥̅ =
𝑛
• Median: the value in the middle of the distribution

• Mode: the value that occurs most often in the distribution.

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 Measures of dispersion
• Range:
– Spread of the data.
– Distance between the largest & the smallest values.
• Variance:
– How far away respondents are from the mean.
– Deviation scores: 𝑥 − 𝑥
∑
– Variance: 𝑠 =
• Standard deviation:
– The square root of the variance: 𝑠 = 𝑠

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Measures of dispersion
• Skewness: measuring the departure from a symmetrical
distribution

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 Measures of dispersion
• Kurtosis: measure of a distribution’s peakedness (or
flatness)

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Outliers
• Respondent/observation that has one or more values that
are distinctly different from the values of other respondents
– Data collection or data entry error
– Respondents that are very different from the norm:
• An accurate observation that represents the true characteristics of that
individual.
• But that distorts the findings of the population

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