now there are two basic types of variables that we come across in statistics the first type is known as qualitative variables and the second type are known as quantitative variables a qualitative variable is used to describe something that is either categorical or non numeric a good way to think about qualitative variables is the first four letters of the word qual standing for quality and by quality we referring to the actual type of something as opposed to how many or an exact numerical value common qualitative variables can include things like eye color gender religious affiliation political organizations that you affiliate with and even your actual major the important thing the commonality here with a qualitative variable is that they are non numeric in nature they're not describing the amount of something but rather they're describing a type of something if you will for example if we were to go ahead and survey students related to their major at a college it would look something like this and so really our focus here is on the actual non numeric variable is finding out which particular major they are not necessarily the quantity with in any particular major although we can certainly go there now a quantitative variable works in a very similar fashion with the exception of the fact that with a quantitative variable we're focusing on how much or how many of something so some common examples of quantitative variables can include everything from company revenues on an income statement it can include the age of employees can include salary of employees can even include things like IQ now quantitative variables can fall into two specific categories they either fall into what we call discrete variables or continuous variables the discrete variable is one that can only assume a certain value and what happens are there are certain gaps that exist between these values the common example of the discrete variable would be the number of rooms in a so if I were to ask you how many rooms there are in your home you would have to give me a discrete variable you would tell me something along the lines of maybe two three four maybe even five rooms and the reason this is a discrete variable is because you are only allowed to select certain options there you can't go between one and two so say 1.25 or 1.75 and that's the reason why it's a discrete variable because you can't select there are gaps between those values we can only select kind of those figures those ones twos threes fours and fives of course now a continuous variable is one that can assume any value within a certain range so a common continuous variable would be prophets so prophets can be very very specific you're not only predisposed to certain selections there's not certain gaps so they can be very very detailed that would be an example of that you can also say that square footage in a house could be a continuous variable as well although typically we do round those things since we don't to be concerned with the smaller details but ultimately that would be a continuous variable thank you for watching this