Term for non-quantitative, non-qualitative variables? Disclaimer: I am a coder -- not at all a research scientist, data scientist, or statistician.
I support an online survey application that is then used to generate aggregate and individual data reports and visualizations.  For the sake of internal bookkeeping, we categorize all of our variables according to type (categorical, ratio, numeric, etc). We don't really gather qualitative data (and I have to admit, I'm not familiar with any ways these might be categorized).
We also collect a lot of data, that for want of a better term, we call nonresearch data -- e.g. person names, organizational names, and address information. I'm wondering if there's a better term that we could be using when talking about (and more importantly, categorizing) this data.
 A: In principle, this is categorical (also called "nominal") data. In a four-data-type system, that's the catch-all type for unordered, non-numerical data.
But you've unfortunately found the limit of the four-type classification system. The term "categorical" implies that the data can fall into a relatively small number of categories and follows a categorical distribution. That's technically also true for addresses, but isn't a helpful mental model. And if you're developing automated data-cleaning procedures that operate based on assigned data type, you might run into problems dealing with a large number of unique and unusually long "category" values like "4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, England."
I don't think there's one accepted term for this, but if you're just looking for a name for this type of category I'd consider terms like "administrative," or your own term "nonresearch." You could also just call it "qualitative" in order to distinguish it from the more-but-not-entirely-quantitative "categorical/nominal" type. You could also call it "metadata," but I feel like that would be confusing: is it "meta" with respect to observations, or "meta" with respect to the data set?
