2.1 Process of Describing

How do we go about a descriptive quantitative analysis?

  1. Substantive Expertise: Start with a topic, puzzle, or question (e.g., How is the economy doing?)
  2. Find outcome data relevant to that question (e.g., GDP)
    • Start from a concept: what we want to describe (i.e., health of the economy)
    • Move toward an “operationalization” (i.e., a way to measure it)
    • Easy! except… social science is messy. Our concepts are rich, while our measures may be very narrow or concrete.
      • For example, GDP is one way to measure economic health, but is it the only measure?
      • Choose measures based on validity, reliability, cost
  3. Find multiple relevant units or “data points”
    • E.g., Multiple years of data (e.g., U.S., from 1900 to 2020)
    • E.g., Multiple countries from one year (e.g., U.S. to Germany to other countries)
  4. Summarize the data to help answer the question

2.1.1 Example Process

  1. How is the economy doing?
  2. Find outcome data relevant to that question
    • Let’s ask people
  3. Find multiple relevant units or data points
    • We will ask several people. Each person will be a data point.
  4. Summarize the data
    • Let’s take the mean

How would you summarize information in explaining it to another person? You would probably want to describe how most people feel about the economy. In other words, you would describe the “central tendency” of people’s responses (the central tendency of the data).