From the course: Data Curation Foundations

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Data and measurement

Data and measurement

From the course: Data Curation Foundations

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Data and measurement

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- [Instructor] Let's get philosophical for a moment, and ponder the concepts of data and measurement, and how they are related. Let's think of a concrete example. Let's say we have medical record data, which includes the variables on the slide. Maybe we are studying tobacco-use and heart disease. So we are happy to see that both blood pressure and tobacco-use measurements are available. Also, height and weight are helpful to have, because we can tell if the patient is overweight. But actually, it would be naive to think that blood pressure and weight data in a medical record were equally as valid and accurate as tobacco-use data. The first three variables on the slide were probably measured at the doctor's office, by a trained clinician, while the last three were measured by a self-report, like the clinician asked the patient, or they weren't even measured at all. Just because the variables might be blank in the data…

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