Cases

Cases

In research, cases—also called objects or research units—are the entities that a study focuses on. They are the “things” about which data are collected and analyzed. Depending on the discipline and research question, cases may be individuals, groups, organizations, or other units of interest. For example, a psychologist might study people, an economist might study firms, and a sociologist might study families or households. In quantitative research, cases are often represented as rows in a data frame, with each row corresponding to one case and each column representing a measured variable.


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    • relative frequency histogram

      Relative frequency histogram is a histogram that represents proportion (instead of frequency) of cases on the y-axis.

    • sampling with replacement

      Sampling with replacement takes a sample from a population, record the values, put all cases back into the population, then sample again; the R function resample() does this.

    • population

      Population is the universe of cases that could be sampled and measured for a study.

    • histogram

      Histogram is a visualization where the x-axis represents the values of the variable while the y-axis represents frequency; the height of a bar in a histogram represents how many cases have that range of values.

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      Observations are sometimes called cases or objects or research units, observations are the things that we are interested in studying. For example, a psychologist might study people, an economist might study businesses, a sociologist might study ...