Chapter 2
Understanding the Role of Data¹

Quantifying the world is often a bit more involved than simply determining how much there is of variable A or how many there are of variable B. The complication: ”it depends.” There may be other variables C or D that need to be taken into consideration. For example, suppose you are the CEO of a large company and you want data on the salaries of your employees in order to ensure fairness and equity, provide incentives, control costs, and yet keep your company competitive. A simple approach: How much does employee 23 earn? employee 24? Etc. This is certainly useful data to have at hand–you know how much of variable A and how many of variable B. But that is not enough. As CEO, it would be much more useful for you to know, in addition, the employee’s department, years of experience at the company, job grade, educational level, age, and gender. What you really want to know is how much of A and how many of B broken down by categories C, D, E, F, G, and H. Quantifying the world, then, does not necessarily mean thinking of the world in terms of numbers only, but also in terms of categories. We will learn how to distinguish and classify various kinds of variable data in the first section of the chapter. In the second section, we will practice coding these differing data and entering the data into a spreadsheet.