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If I went through a box of candy which contains 4 types of flavor (orange, grape, apple, strawberry) and recorded the number of each flavor in my worksheet, what is the type of data that it is involved: qualitative or quantitative?

I was very confused, that the flavor have 4 categories, which is categorical variable. When I count each of the types of flavor and record the result in a nice table, it looks like that it is quantitative data. Can someone explain this to me? Thank you.

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  • $\begingroup$ Is this a home work? $\endgroup$
    – Aksakal
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 4:12
  • $\begingroup$ no, i just confused whether the variable flavor is quantitative or qualitative. $\endgroup$
    – NoraNorad
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 4:19

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I see two variables, which could immediately be recognized in your box of candy example - flavor and number of candies of a particular flavor. Flavor is a categorical variable (nominal scale) and number of candies is a numeric variable (ratio scale). According to the established theory of measurement, based on work by S. Stevens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement), flavor is to be categorized as a qualitative variable, while number of candies is a quantitative one.

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