Quantitative and Qualitative Sources

Information can be quantitative or qualitative:

Quantitative Information – Involves a measurable quantity—numbers are used. Some examples are length, mass, temperature, and time. Quantitative information is often called data but can also be things other than numbers.

Qualitative Information – Involves a descriptive judgment using concept words instead of numbers. Gender, country name, animal species, and emotional state are examples of qualitative information.

Some sources contain either quantitative information or qualitative information, but sources often contain both.

Many people first think of information as something like what’s in a table or spreadsheet of numbers and words. But information can be conveyed in more ways than textually or numerically.

A variety of formats (such as tables, images, sound, and video) may be used as information or used to convey information. Some examples:

• A video of someone watching scenes from horror movies, with information about their heart rate and blood pressure embedded in the video. Instead of getting a description of the person’s reactions to the scenes, you can see their reactions.
• A database of information about birds, which includes a sound file for each bird singing.
• A list of colors, which includes an image of each actual color. Such a list is extremely helpful, especially when there are A LOT of color names.
• Speech; for example, a friend orally tells you that a new pizza place is 3 blocks away, charges $2 a slice, and that the pizza is delicious. This may never be recorded, but it may be very valuable information if you’re hungry!
• A map of Ohio with counties shaded different intensities of red according to the median household income of inhabitants.

Fact or Opinion

Thinking about the reason an author produced a source can be helpful to you because that reason was what dictated the kind of information they  chose to include. Depending on that purpose, the author may have chosen to include factual, analytical, and objective information. Or, instead, it may have suited his/her purpose to include information that was subjective and therefore less factual and analytical. The author’s reason for producing the source also determined whether he or she included more than one perspective or just his/her own.

Authors typically want to do at least one of the following:

• Inform and educate
• Persuade
• Sell services or products or
• Entertain

Combined Purposes

Sometimes authors have a combination of purposes, as when a marketer decides they  can sell more smart phones with an informative sales video that also entertains us. The same is true when a singer writes and performs a song that entertains us but that she intends to make available for sale. Other examples of authors having multiple purposes occur in most scholarly writing.

In those cases, authors certainly want to inform and educate their audiences. But they also want to persuade their audiences that what they are reporting and/or postulating is a true description of a situation, event, or phenomenon or a valid argument that their audience must take a particular action. In this blend of purposes, the intent to educate and inform is considered to trump the intent to persuade.

Why Intent Matters

Authorial intent usually matters in how useful a source’s information can be to your research project, depending on which information need you are trying to meet. For instance, when you’re looking for sources that will help you actually decide your answer to your research question or evidence for your answer that you will share with your audience, you will want the author’s main purpose to have been to inform or educate his/her audience. That’s because, with that intent, they are likely to have used:

• Facts where possible
• Multiple perspectives instead of just his/her own
• Little subjective information
• Seemingly unbiased, objective language that cites where they got the information

The reason you want this kind of resource when trying to answer your research question or explaining that answer is because all of those characteristics will lend credibility to the argument you are making with your project. Both you and your audience will simply find it easier to believe—will have more confidence in the argument being made—when you include those types of sources.

Sources whose authors intend only to persuade others won’t meet your information need for an answer to your research question or evidence with which to convince your audience. That’s because they don’t always confine themselves to facts. Instead, they tell us their opinions without backing them up with evidence. If you used those sources, your readers will notice and not believe your argument.

Fact vs. Opinion vs. Objective vs. Subjective

Need to brush up on the differences between fact, objective information, subjective information, and opinion?

Continue Reading: 21.4 Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources