Suppose you access a healthcare database that has a variable called "initial mental status evaluation." In this variable, doctors report their subjective perception of the patient's mental state. Upon inspecting the data, you see that this column is of string type and contains only the following values: "anxious," "depressed," "euthymic," and "manic." How would you classify this attribute/variable?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The question asks how to classify a variable that stores doctors’ subjective perceptions of a patient’s mental state, with values stored as strings: "anxious," "depressed," "euthymic," and "manic." 
Option 1: Unstructured text data. While the values are text, they are drawn from a limited, predefined set rather than free-form text. This makes them structured, not unstructured, so this option is not appropriate.
Option 2: Structured numerical data. The values are not numbers at all; they are textual labels. Therefore this label does not fit structured numerical data, and this option is incorrect.
Option 3: Quantitative data. Quantitative data are numeric and allow arithmetic operations. Since these are words representing mood states, the data are not numeric, so this option is incorrect.
Option 4: Categorical data. The values represent categories (mood states) and are qualitative in nature. They are not numeric and do not imply a continuous measurement. This aligns with the standard definition of a categorical (qualitative) variable. Note that while some mood states could be ordered by severity, the data as presented are treated as categories (nominal) unless an explicit ordinal scale is defined.
In summary, the given attribute is best described as categorical data because it consists of distinct qualitative labels drawn from a fixed set, rather than numbers or free-form text.

ECON3310001.1251 Quiz 4: What is Data?

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