Quantitative data analysis

This chapter provides a brief introduction to quantitative data analysis, explaining processes for the preparation of quantitative data and common techniques for data description and analysis. The context for the examples used in the chapter is a project management website, used by information technology (IT) students in the third year of their undergraduate degree. The description of data preparation includes data cleaning, as well as data transformation and integration. Statistics, used to investigate numerical data, include descriptive statistics for describing distributions and relationships between variables, and inferential statistics. The latter cover testing for differences between distributions using parametric and nonparametric tests (according to the type of data involved). Examples of different types of tests are provided, using the project management website dataset which is the focus of the chapter.