See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/299534063

Quantitative Data Analysis Approaches

Chapter · March 2016

DOI: 10.23912/978-1-910158-51-7-2786

CITATIONS READS

0 41,442

4 authors:

Babak Taheri Catherine Porter

Heriot-Watt University Lancaster University
117 PUBLICATIONS   2,582 CITATIONS    70 PUBLICATIONS   861 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Christian König Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos

ROI Management Consulting Technological University Dublin - City Campus
22 PUBLICATIONS   80 CITATIONS    19 PUBLICATIONS   32 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Open Research in Sustainability Science (Doors) View project

Business Ethics and CSR View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Babak Taheri on 31 March 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Kevin O’Gorman
GMS
Robert MacIntosh

THE GLOBAL MANAGEMENT SERIES

Research Methods
for Business
& Management
Second edition

Quantitative Data Analysis Approaches

Babak Taheri, Catherine Porter, Christian König and
Nikolaos Valantasis-Kanellos

This is a sample only. Full information and purchase details for this title
are available at http://www.goodfellowpublishers.com and for other
titles in the series at the Global Management Series page.
THE GLOBAL MANAGEMENT SERIES

Research Methods
for Business
& Management
Second edition

A guide to writing your dissertation

Kevin O’Gorman and Robert MacIntosh

(G) Goodfellow Publishers Ltd

(G)
Published by Goodfellow Publishers Limited,
26 Home Close, Wolvercote, Oxford OX2 8PS
http://www.goodfellowpublishers.com

First published 2014

This edition 2015

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this

title is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: on file.

ISBN: 978-1-910158-51-7

Copyright © Kevin O’Gorman and Robert MacIntosh, 2014, 2015

All rights reserved. The text of this publication, or any part thereof, may not
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information
retrieval system, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher or
under licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details
of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the
Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street,
London EC1N 8TS.

All trademarks used herein are the property of their repective owners, The
use of trademarks or brand names in this text does not imply any affiliation
with or endorsement of this book by such owners.

Design and typesetting by P.K. McBride, www.macbride.org.uk

Cover design by Cylinder

This is a sample only. Full information and purchase details for this
title are available at http://www.goodfellowpublishers.com and
for other titles in the series at the Global Management Series page.
 Contents

1 The Nature of Research 1

Robert MacIntosh and Nigel Caldwell
2 The Key is in the Reading: Finding a Project 15
Andrew MacLaren and Emma Hill
3 The Literature Review 31
Norin Arshed and Mike Danson
4 Mapping Research Methods 50
Kevin O’Gorman and Robert MacIntosh
5 Case Studies and Data 75
Angeliki Papachroni and Sean Lochrie
6 From Archives to the Internet 96
Keith Gori & Rodrigo Perez-Vega
7 Qualitative Data Gathering Techniques 118
Sean Lochrie, Ross Curran and Kevin O’Gorman
8 Qualitative Data Analysis Approaches 140
Katherine J C Sang and Rafał Sitko
9 Quantitative Data Gathering Techniques 155

Babak Taheri, Catherine Porter, Nikolaos Valantasis-Kanellos and Christian König

10 Quantitative Data Analysis Approaches 174
Babak Taheri, Catherine Porter, Christian König and Nikolaos Valantasis-Kanellos
11 Managing Ethics in Research Projects 196
James Richards, Lakshman Wimalasena and Gavin MacLean
12 Writing Up Your Research Project 212
Robert MacIntosh, Thomas Farrington and John Sanders
Appendices
A1 Managing Your Research Project 229
John Sanders, Vera Tens and Robert MacIntosh
A2 Assessing Your Research Project 240
Nigel Caldwell and Robert MacIntosh
A3 Project Structure and Word Counts 245
Kevin O’Gorman
Index 247
174 Research Methods for Business and Management

10 Quantitative Data
Analysis Approaches

Babak Taheri, Catherine Porter, Christian König

and Nikolaos Valantasis-Kanellos

In order to understand data and present findings in an accurate way, researchers and
managers need to develop an awareness of statistical analysis techniques. The previ-
ous chapter concentrated on quantitative data collection, this chapter delves into the
statistical tools used to analyse the data once collected. It focuses on two sets of the
most widely used statistical tools – exploring relationships and comparing groups – as
shown in the ‘Deductive’ section in the Data Analysis area of the Methods Map (see
Chapter 4). Finally, we briefly explain the nature of Big Data.

Data preparation
Real-life data generally cannot be used directly for data analysis – they are
unorganised and filled with different types of problems and errors. We
discuss three pre-processing steps that prepare data for further analysis:
data entry, data cleaning and data formatting.

„„ Data entry
A conventional way to organise data is to use tables, with records as rows
and attributes as columns. A record is an identifiable piece of information
which contains a set of values of attributes to the record. For example, one
may organise the information collected from questionnaires in the follow-
ing way: each record corresponds to all the answers from a respondent, with
each attribute associated with the answer to one question.
 Quantitative Data Analysis Approaches 175

No matter how careful one is, it is difficult to avoid making mistakes

when entering data. To maintain a certain level of precision, one could use
double entry. Its idea is very simple – let two individuals enter the same
content and compare their inputs. When discrepancies are found, one shall
verify and maintain the correct copy. By doubling efforts, double entry is
very efficient in preventing entry mistakes. Another method is to use encod-
ing to avoid entering text data directly. For example, when entering gender
information such as ‘male’ or ‘female’ in text forms, some may introduce
typos such as ‘mael’ and ‘femeal’, and some may capitalize the first letters
as ‘Female’ and ‘Male’, which could be interpreted as different words.
Alternatively, one can encode ‘male’ as ‘0’ and ‘female’ as ‘1’, so that one
could enter 0s and 1s instead. The encoding function is explicitly provided
in many data analysis software such as SPSS (Statistical package for the
social sciences). SPSS can be used to analyse questionnaire-based and other
data organised as cases with particular variables. Figure 10.1 illustrates a
snapshot of variable view (information on variables is entered in the SPSS)
and data value (data entered directly or can be imported from a spreadsheet
file) on SPSS. Table 10.1 explains the information required for each variable
in the questionnaire.

Table 10.1: Information required for each variable in the questionnaire in variable view in
SPSS

Variable Label Short Description

Name Up to 8 characters (no spaces), starting with a letter
Not allowed: ALL, AND, BY, EQ, GT, LE, LT, NE, NOT, WITH, OR, TO
Can be: short version of item description e.g., var01, Q1a
Width Max. no. of characters
Decimal places Decimal places for numbers
10
Label Longer version of name
Values Values for coded variables
Missing Blanks, no answer, etc
Columns No. of columns in data view screen
Alignment Left, right, centre
Types of measure Nominal, ordinal, scales
176 Research Methods for Business and Management

Figure 10.1: Example of (top) variable view and (bottom) data view in SPSS software
 Quantitative Data Analysis Approaches 177

„„ Data cleaning
Even if there are no errors introduced during entry phase, real-life data
need to be cleaned because they are often incomplete, noisy and inconsistent
(Han, Kamber, & Pei, 2011). Incompleteness arises when for some records
the values for some attributes are missing. There are mainly two ways to
deal with this issue. First, delete the whole record that misses data; this
could be viable when the number of records with missing data is relatively
small compared to the whole dataset. Second, fill the missing values; one
can use the expected value on the corresponding attribute or regression on
other attributes to predict the missing value. Noises refer to random factors
that can only be quantified in a probabilistic way. Noises confound obser-
vations and cause outliers that are far away from normal observations. A
primary task of data cleaning is to identify and ‘smooth’ out these outliers.
Inconsistencies often arise when one combines information from different
sources. For example, combining datasets with both American and British
date information may cause confusion (i.e. the 3rd of April 1990 could be
displayed as both 4/3/90 and 3/4/90).

Preliminary analysis
„„ Describing data
To present a sample in an illustrative way one can either use descriptive
statistics (numbers) or graphs, or both; it is a matter of personal preference –
some prefer descriptive statistics because they are quantifiable while others
prefer graphs because they are more intuitive. Therefore, when deciding
which form to present data, it is important to know who your target audi-
ence is.
10
If the sample is of a nonmetric type (for example an ordinal scale as
described in Chapter 9), frequency and ratio are two commonly used descrip-
tive statistics. Frequency counts the number of occurrences of a specific
category, and ratio calculates the corresponding percentage of frequency
in the entire sample. Nonmetric data can be visualised through pie charts
or bar charts. We give an example on the cut quality of diamonds based
on a dataset with 53940 records (Source: http://vincentarelbundock.github.
io/Rdatasets/datasets.html). The cut quality of diamonds is a nonmetric
measurement and has five categories: fair, good, very good, premium and

View publication stats