Survey Tips
Qualitative vs. quantitative survey: how to classify yours
Qualitative or quantitative survey? Short answer: a standardized questionnaire is quantitative, even if it ends with a couple of open-ended boxes.
Maria Malzew
(female) author
Maria Malzew is a media studies scholar and writes for empirio.ai about academic work, empirical research methods, and navigating the path through your 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 truly academic: empirical research methods, qualitative and quantitative approaches, sampling, 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 paper to analyzing your own data collection.
Articles by Maria Malzew
Empirical Research
Writing Your Thesis at a Company: Here's How to Make It Work
Writing your thesis at a company: the timeline from approval to defense, when your project needs IRB review and how to collect data on site that your program will accept.
Empirical Research
Descriptive Statistics & Inferential Statistics: Guide
Descriptive statistics tells you what is in your data. When that is enough, when you have to go further, and how to keep it apart from inference.
Survey Tips
Demographic Questions in Surveys: Wording and Examples
Age, race, education and income look like easy questions, and they still wreck plenty of analyses. We show you how to word them and when to leave them out altogether.
Survey Tips
Open-Ended Questions: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
Open-ended questions give you the most interesting answers and the most work. We show you how to word them so something usable comes back, and how to code the free text.
Survey Tips
Closed-Ended Questions: Definition, Types, Pros and Cons
A closed-ended question lives or dies by its answer list. We show you how to build choices that leave nothing out and never overlap, and how many scale points to put on offer.
Glossary
Absolute Scale: Definition, Examples and How to Use It
An absolute scale counts in units that cannot be converted into anything else, because a headcount stays a headcount. We show you how to recognize it and what you may calculate.
Glossary
Ratio Scale: Definition, Examples and Allowed Statistics
Zero dollars means no income, but zero degrees Fahrenheit does not mean no heat. That one difference decides whether you may say “twice as much” about your data.
Glossary
Interval Scale: Definition, Examples and Calculations
An interval scale has equal gaps but no true starting point, which is what makes GPA such an awkward case. We show you what you may calculate and where rating scales sit.
Page 1 of 5