Businesses have these four types of data

Managing data is important for staying ahead of your competition. While there are plenty of data types available, we are focusing on the four main types.

Quantitative

This is the data expressed in quantities through numerical values, such as numbers, percentages, or even units of time. If you need to know how many or how much of something your business has, or how frequently something occurs, this is the data you need.

If you need to gauge sales for a product, numbers are – of course – the best way to express this. To measure how often employees are in the workplace, you would track the total hours and total employees to form equations. With seas of data at your fingertips, it is worth seeking a data analysis company such as https://shepper.com/ to help identify the most important information.

Qualitative

Instead of numbers, this method deals with characteristics. Qualitative data often takes the form of opinions and is collected through questioning, such as ‘What are your thoughts on this change?’.
Most businesses balance qualitative and quantitative data to reach a holistic understanding of their business, with surveys, interviews and questionnaires providing the ‘why’ data to accompany and understand the ‘what’ (quantitative) data.

Nominal

Nominal data is the labelling variety, a middle-ground between qualitative and quantitative data for organising groups. Nominal data can’t be ordered from lowest to highest but can organise data into designated groups together; for example, if you were conducting a study with lots of people involved, you would use nominal data to distinguish them by factors such as their hair colour, age, or sex  This is especially common in voting, where demographics are labelled and preferences correlated.

Ordinal

Much like the previous types, the clue is in the name. This data is for ordering, combining nominal and quantitative data using a specific order expressed as a label. This data is for expressing the performance or superiority of a given subject. Consider a 100-metre race, for example, where the results would display the order of the runners to identify the fastest of the group