Righttop Essays (1232 words) - Scientific Method,

righttop 2016 Manisha M . Franklin Quantitative Business Analysis 3/9/201640000100000 2016 Manisha M . Franklin Quantitative Business Analysis 3/9/2016left250002514600 Quantitative Techniques and Real World Uses900007300 Quantitative Techniques and Real World Uses rightcenter00 Data gathering is a fine art that many people haven't mastered. In general, for most purposes, you want to gather quantitative data. Quantitative data is a data type which revolves around collecting numerical data rather than qualitative data . You will find that you can act upon quantitativedata, as the numbers are easily measurable. Qualitative data is often collected in fields where you cannot gain numerical answers, such as psychology and other social sciences. The term quantitative techniques covers a broad range of statistical gathering techniques that are all focused on getting numerical data for statistical analysis. These statistics are often then used for research and analysis leading to business decisions. These quantitative results can come from a wide variety of sources. The best quality data that you can get, in terms of quantitative techniques, is the double blind test. A double blind test gives the most accurate results as any bias that might occur in the test subjects or the tester will not be represented in the result. A double blind test makes it so both the tester and the test subjects in the experiment do not know the true reason for the experiment and are often told that the experiment is testing something else completely. If you are testing a drug that makes people stronger, you give half of the test subjects a fake, sugar pill which is often known as a placebo, whilst giving the other half of the group the real drug. If you were to give everyone the same drug, any affects you see in the patients may not be because of the drug as the human mind is very easily manipulated. The placebo group are used as a type of baseline for any experiment. In business, there are many other types of quantitative techniques you might apply to your data. All quantitative techniques fall broadly under the umbrellas of mathematical, statistical, or programming based techniques and each has their own benefits and drawbacks. Most businesses will use multiple techniques simultaneously as this will give the company a more rounded picture of how to use the data correctly. Quantitative techniques are much more accurate than Qualitative techniques, as they eliminate the bias associated with both qualitative tests and non-blind tests. A popular type of quantitative technique is differentiation. Differentiation is a mathematical process involving calculus and it is useful for seeing change over time within a given system. Differentiation is generally used to figure out the changes in a system when a variable in the system changes, measuring how the end result changes by altering a variable. This could be used in many ways: in cooking, chemistry, and many physical sciences, yet it is less useful in a social science. Differentiation also has an opposite, integration, which works in the opposite way. Integration is used to see the changes to a variable when the system changes. Regression analysis is incredibly useful and a whole host of people use this technique every single day in their business life. Generally, economists are interested in the concept of regression analysis, which is based around finding a causal link or correlation between two independent variables in any given system. A common example for regression analysis is that of measuring the salary of an employee and their level of education, to see if there is a correlation between the two factors. You could also use this in cooking and many other fields, as you can see. Regression analysis is useable in many fields and will save you time if you learn how to use it and integrate in to your business. Simulation is a great way to get pseudo real world data on anything that can be simulated effectively in a controlled environment. If you can simulate a scenario effectively, you can then see how test subjects respond to stressors and often this information is very valuable. It's not just used for living things however, a wind tunnel is a widely used simulator to test the aerodynamics of cars and