Question

In what ways do frequency distributions for qualitative data differ from those for quantitative data?

Answer 1

By Quantitative Statistical data we mean a sequence or a set of numerical measurements made on some of the objects in a specified population. Therefore we may say that these types of data arise if we are observing, for each individual of a group, a character which can be measured in numbers. Such a character will be referred to as a quantitative character or a variable.
For example, the heights of 10 students of a college constitute quantitative data and the quantitative data are: 5’6”, 5’5”, 5’4”, 5’8”, 5’6”, 5’7”, 5’4”, 5’5”, 5’9” and 5’7”. The character “Height of students” is a quantitative character or variable.

By Qualitative Statistical data we mean a set of observations in which each observation in the sample or population belongs to one of several mutually exclusive classes which are likely to be non−numerical. For this type of data, the character observed is not measurable in numerical terms. Such a character is called a qualitative character or an attribute.
The “color of a flower” can be classified as red, blue, white and others. The colors of ten flowers in a garden are recorded as: R, W, O, B, R, W, W, R, O and R. The data is qualitative data and the character “color of flower’ is a qualitative character or an attribute.

when we tabulate the value in a table that becomes an frequency table by using the above information for quantitative vs qualitative data.