Qualitative Data Frequency
Definition 1
- The frequency at which each observation of qualitative data appears is referred to as Frequency.
- Dividing the frequency by the total number of data and multiplying the relative frequency by 100 is called Relative Frequency and Percentage, respectively.
- How each frequency or relative frequency is distributed across several categories is known as Frequency Distribution.
Explanation
Frequency, often translated as frequency in the context of physics, in the context of statistics, means literally how often a particular data is found. However, the word “frequency” can cause confusion if not used academically, so it’s understood to be simply referred to as Frequency without the Hanja for frequency (頻).
Though it’s written in somewhat complicated language, in fact, it just means “how many times”. For a very simple example, if a coin is flipped 50 times resulting in 40 heads and 10 tails, then their respective Frequencies are 40 and 10, and their Relative Frequencies are 0.8 and 0.2. Thinking conventionally, it would seem suspicious that the coin landed heads up so many times in this example. Our natural curiosity would lead us to question whether the coin is Fair, and understanding the Frequency Distribution allows us to proceed with statistical inference.
See Also
경북대학교 통계학과. (2008). 엑셀을 이용한 통계학: p16. ↩︎