ENVS178 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Face Validity, Orillia, Hydrology

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Environmental Studies
• Course: ENVS178
• Professor: Jeff Casello

Document Summary

Data: systematically recorded information, whether numbers or labels, together with its context (p. 11 de veaux et al. ) Secondary data: collected, edited, cleaned, aggregated and/or interpreted by someone other than the researcher. Example: suppose that you are interested in recycling and that you decide to do a research project on this topic. For your recycling study, you might be interested in any of a number of variables. Variable: speciic characteristic that may take on any of a number of diferent values for each observation. A number of terms are used to describe variables: Numbers act as numerical values (discrete or continuous); may be summarized in categories. Qualitative variables: individual responses are usually words, but may be coded as numbers or tallies are also possible. Nominal- and ordinal-level data can be counted or tallied, but it is not appropriate to do any arithmetic with the data, even when observations are expressed as numbers: Some quantitative variables are discrete: counted, integer numbers.