Qualitative Data in Science

As we near the end of senior project, I have been giving some thought into what I would like to present as the results of this research study. 

Due to time constraints, I was not able to scan wounds on actual patients. Instead of presenting the data on a large cluster of wounds, I have decided to take a qualitative approach to discussing the wound models and their digitization. 

Qualitative data includes anything that is not numerical in nature. There are three general types of qualitative data in science. 

In-depth interviews involve talking to a person or group. As is expected, their responses usually cannot be converted into numbers. Even setting a scale which appropriates a number to each response may not be feasible, since responses may vary and cause over-generalizations. 

Another type are written documents. While the content of the documents can be analyzed, they are similar to in-depth interviews. The results depend on the words in the document rather than any numerical values. 

The last type I'm going to talk about is direct observation. This depends on the experience of the experimenter through any of their senses. As such, the results that come out of this type of study can be very different. The data can range as anything from audio recordings to drawings.

The results for my project will be the wound models as well as pictures of their scans. This will allow me to compare the phantoms to the scans to judge how well they are represented. I can look at color, size, depth, and texture in order to address the viability of laser scanning to digitize a wound's morphology.