Question

I need to write a sort one paper page for a marketing research course I am taking. Could someone help me think of different ways to answer the following scenario? Thanks!

Quantitative data may be more familiar to most people as we see numbers, figures, and percentages in the media every day. Still, data can be interpreted differently. Here is a short scenario for you:

We look at the grade chart provided by Jefferson College. A, B, C, D, and F – and we have labels for them – A: Excellent, B: Above Average, C: Average, D: Below Average, and F: Failure.

Now, if you were to conduct a simple quantitative analysis for a classroom of 15 people, taking each of their final grades and lining them up, how many would be above and below “Average?”

Why do you think, in many of your classes, most people are getting above average for a grade – considering that a C grade is Average? Shouldn’t half the class be above C and the other half below C?

Answer 1

Let us take another example of product rating by customers. The product may be of two types as attracting towards customer or not. In those cases we can observe pattern of rating as follows.

• Suppose, a particular product is attractive towards customers. Then most of the product ratings are observe to be 'Above Average' and few as 'Excellent' and very viewer with classification as 'Average' or 'Below Average'. Thus we observe that the pattern of ratings is not symmetric at all.
• Suppose, a particular product is not at all attractive towards customers. Then most of the product ratings are observe to be 'Below Average' and few as 'Average' and very viewer with classification as 'Above Average'. Thus we observe that the pattern of ratings is not symmetric at all.

Another classic example would be the number of certain goods bought by different families. Goods can also be broadly classified into two groups as discussed in the following.

• Necessary goods in our day to day life- Goods like food materials, medicine etc are in this group. Number of these items consumed by consumers are higher in number than average.
• Luxury goods in our day to day life- Goods like television, mobile, laptop, refrigerator etc are in this group. Number of these items consumed by consumers are lower in number than average.