Survey Tips
Is your survey qualitative or quantitative? How to tell
Is your survey qualitative or quantitative? In short: a standardised questionnaire is quantitative, even when it ends with two free-text boxes.
Maria Malzew
Author
Maria Malzew is a media studies scholar and writes for empirio.ai about academic work, empirical research methods and the path through the final thesis. She obtained her academic background at the University of Hamburg and Kiel University. Since 2021 she has been responsible at empirio.ai for the area where things get academic: empirical research methods, qualitative and quantitative approaches, samples, levels of measurement, quality criteria, and the question of how a vague idea becomes a research question you can actually work with. She also covers topics related to the thesis itself, from finding a topic and structuring the thesis through to analysing your own data collection.
Articles by Maria Malzew
Empirical Research
Writing a Master's Thesis in a Company: Here's How It Works
Writing a master's dissertation at a company: what 60 credits really costs in hours, how many hours you may work alongside it, and who is allowed to mark the result.
Empirical Research
Writing Your Bachelor's Thesis at a Company: Here's How It Works
How to find a UK organisation for your dissertation: the channels that get replies, what goes in the proposal, and the agreement that leaves you time to write.
Empirical Research
Writing Your Thesis at a Company: Here's How to Make It Work
Writing your dissertation at a company: the timeline from approval to submission, how a thesis embargo actually works and how to collect data on site that your university will accept.
Empirical Research
Descriptive Statistics & Inferential Statistics: Guide
Descriptive statistics tells you what is in your data. When that is enough, when you need to go further, and how to keep it apart from inference.
Survey Tips
Demographic Questions in Surveys: Wording and Examples
Age, sex, ethnicity and income look harmless, yet they ruin plenty of analyses. We show you how to word them, when to drop them and what data protection expects of you.
Survey Tips
Open-Ended Questions: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
An open-ended question earns you the richest answers and the heaviest workload. Find out how to word one so the replies are usable and how to code free text afterwards.
Survey Tips
Closed-Ended Questions: Definition, Types, Pros and Cons
With a closed-ended question the answer options do the work. Find out how to build a list that leaves nothing out, avoids overlap and carries the right number of scale points.
Glossary
Absolute Scale: Definition, Examples and Calculations
With an absolute scale the unit is fixed, so a headcount stays a headcount and nothing converts. Find out how to recognise it and which calculations its values will support.
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