# What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative observations?

Aug 1, 2016

In very short, quantitative is primarily numerical, and qualitative is primarily descriptive, but it isn't black/white.

So let's say you time $50$ people unscrewing a cap off a new water bottle. For your data, you might have gotten:

• $20$ people could do it in $3$ seconds.
• $20$ people could do it in $5$ seconds.
• $10$ people could do it in $6$ seconds.

QUANTITATIVE STATEMENT

If you say, "40% of the people finished in less than $4$ seconds", you have made a quantitative statement. You can convince yourself it's a true statement through pure logic:

20/50 = 0.4 = 40%, and yes, $3 < 4$, so only 40% of the people finished in less than $4$ seconds.

QUALITATIVE STATEMENT

A qualitative statement you could make is:

"Most people in the experiment were going as fast as possible."

For this statement:

No numbers are mentioned, so this is definitely qualitative. It's simply an observation on how people were behaving during the experiment.

Since the experiment did not involve measuring hand speeds, it's just a qualitative observation.

GREY AREA

If you said something like:

"More people finished in $5$ seconds than in $6$ seconds."

...then it's a little bit of both. It's a qualitative statement... about a quantitative observation. Remember that quantitative and qualitative statements are not black/white.