How to Find and Work with Data

As they work to comply with recent executive orders, some federal agencies have modified or removed access to federally funded data. 

Many organizations are working together to archive critical research data. The document below from compiles current data rescue efforts and resources. 

Largely, data falls into two broad categories:

• Qualitative: descriptive, interpretive, and language-based. This data is often collected in surveys, questionnaires, interviews and attempts to answer questions of motive, reasoning, and opinion.
  • Qualitative data can be further classified as either nominal or ordinal.
    • Nominal data includes variable labels with no inherent order to them, such as hair color or birth place.
    • Ordinal data contains variable labels with some inherent order, such as the scale from "strongly agree" to strongly disagree."
• Quantitative: numerical, often consisting of measurements or counts. This data is often collected by instrumentation or by surveys designed with numerical scales and often attempts to answer questions of how many or how much.
  • Quantitative data can be further categorized as discrete or continuous.
    • Discrete data comes in the form of whole numbers or integers. All count data is discrete.
    • Continuous data is fractional. Measurements such as height and distance are continuous data.