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Fieldwork involves the collection of information or data. Quantitative data usually consists of factual information that can be counted and used in fieldwork. Qualitative data is more opinion-based, but is still useful for geographical investigations.

Quantitative data

Data often comes in the form of numbers.

Many different things can be measured in fieldwork, for example the velocity of a river, the number of cars or the amount of litter in a particular location.

Numbers can also appear in other forms:

• nominal data – these are numbers that appear as categories, e.g. 1 = yes and 2 = no
• ordinal data – these numbers have an order, e.g. the rank order of cities by population size. For example, it is known that city 1 is more populated than city 2 and 3, but it is not known how many more people there are, as the spacing between each city is not equal
• interval data – these numbers are similar to ordinal, but the difference between each number is equal, e.g. temperature is measured in degrees centigrade
• ratio data – this is when there is a relationship between two sets of numbers, e.g. number of people per doctor