Quantitative Data and Analyses

Quantitative analyses are analyses of numbers – often in large quantities. There are most often two possible sources for these numbers.

The first is statistical sources such as Danmarks Statistik, OECD, The Danish national centre for social research or Eurostat. We are experienced in finding and analyzing these numbers as can be seen in one of our latest analyses on the future of the single family home where we analyze a sample with over 1 million participants.

The second possible source is questionnaires or telephones interviews. Here a suitably large sample size is chosen, who are then asked a series of either specific or open ended questions. The answers are logged to a data file which is then analyzed.

Specific knowledge

We use quantitative analyses to generate knowledge when we want to know something about the entire population, certain groups. It could be the age differences between men and women, differences in income based on location or the square meter usage in apartments for both young people and seniors. When we use statistical data from a place like Danmarks Statistik, we get specific knowledge without any sort of statistical uncertainty since every person in the country is included in their statistics. When we use sample sizes, we’re dealing with a certain controlled uncertainty and when we ask 1000 people about something, we can calculate how certain the result is compared to the entire population.

The present shows the way

Quantitative analyses are widely used in our society. What we can do with quantitative analyses is to use them to garner knowledge of the future. When we know something about the present with certainty, we are in a much better position to venture a guess at the future. That means that we’ve built a specialized knowledge and ability to ask about the things that can illuminate the future and won’t just show a still image of what the situation is right now.

Numbers of the past

The past is interesting as well. Studies of multiple periods and the development over months or years is called time series analysis. They’re very useful to nail down developmental trends and use these to judge whether the trends will continue or if we’re facing a disruption of our current development.

Understanding connections

We are continuously making new quantitative studies and we have a large database with our own results and a number of interesting studies made by others. We spend a lot of our time interpreting and understanding the connection between all these results and finding out what it will mean for the future.