Geography Human Fieldwork Glossary

Primary Data

Data you collect yourself.

Secondary Data

Data someone else collected or information someone else wrote.

Qualitative Data

Data that records subjective qualities (e.g. opinions, attittudes and beliefs) e.g. questionnaire data about why people like an area.

Quantitative Data

Data that records quantities (e.g. numbers, sizes or frequencies) e.g. score /5 for litter.

Accuracy

About how close a measurement is to the actual value. Knowing how to use the equipment and surveys correctly, so your data is correct.

Reliability

Making sure you follow a plan, so that someone else can repeat the investigation.

Validity

Making sure what you decide to measure is going to help you answer your enquiry question.

Limitation

Limitations are about how time, location and resource use could be improved next time.

Bias

How the data might be affected by someone’s opinion.

Sampling

Sampling is how we collect a sample/group of things/data. Often it is impossible to access the whole population. Sampling is quicker and cheaper.

Random (sampling)

Selecting a person to interview/site to measure with no conscious decision. It is unbiased. People or places are not specifically selected.

Systematic (sampling)

Collecting data in an ordered or regular way.

Stratified

Dividing sampling into groups. You can combine this with random sampling to choose these sites.