{"id":3305,"date":"2021-02-23T01:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-23T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=3305"},"modified":"2021-06-18T16:57:08","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T22:57:08","slug":"an-easy-way-to-tell-if-data-is-variable-or-attribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/an-easy-way-to-tell-if-data-is-variable-or-attribute\/","title":{"rendered":"An Easy Way to Tell if Data is Variable or Attribute"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Six Sigma students are often confused by terminology. Variable and attribute data are often confusing. Calling it measured or counted doesn&#8217;t help that much. Here&#8217;s a way to explain it that almost everyone can understand quickly.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/495824122?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Early on when I was teaching Quality Improvement, people kind of struggled with the whole idea of variable and attribute data, and telling them that it was measured and counted didn&#8217;t seem to help a lot.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;As a programmer, the way I think about it is: If it has a decimal point, it has to be measured, right? If it&#8217;s an integer, it&#8217;s most likely counted, right? So it&#8217;s most likely counted, but you could have something like length of stay (number of days that a patient stays in a hospital). That could be an integer, right? Or number of days for a payment to be processed or some sort of time measurement but it&#8217;s done in integers.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So when I start to think about that, that&#8217;s one of the reasons I created the Control Chart Wizard. If I see a single column of decimals, that&#8217;s most likely an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/control-chart\/individual-moving-range-xmr-chart\/\">XmR chart<\/a>. If I see multiple columns of decimals, that&#8217;s most likely an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/control-chart\/x-bar-r-chart\/\">XbarR<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/control-chart\/x-bar-s-chart\/\">XbarS<\/a> chart. If I see a column of integers, that could be a c chart or an XmR chart; if the numbers are big it&#8217;s probably not a c chart because c charts are supposed to be unlikely, right? So an XmR chart is most likely if there&#8217;s bigger numbers and a c chart if they&#8217;re smaller numbers. If I have two columns of integers and one&#8217;s bigger than the other, that&#8217;s probably numerator [and] denominator; that&#8217;s a p or a u chart, right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So if we start to help people understand that variable is decimals and attribute or counted is integers (and sometimes integers can be variable, but yeah\u2026 most of the time they&#8217;re not), that I think is a useful separator. Everybody knows what a decimal is and what an integer is. So maybe there&#8217;s an easier way to explain these things than the ugly way we&#8217;ve been doing it, naming it the official word, right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019m Jay Arthur, author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Hospitals-Improving\/dp\/1259641082\/\">\u201cLean Six Sigma for Hospitals\u201d<\/a> and QI Macros [software]. That&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let&#8217;s make things simpler, all right? Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six Sigma students are often confused by terminology. Variable and attribute data are often confusing. Calling it measured or counted doesn&rsquo;t help that much. Here&rsquo;s a way to explain it that almost everyone can understand quickly. &#65279; &ldquo;Early on when I was teaching Quality Improvement, people kind of struggled with the whole idea of variable [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,5,162],"tags":[227,168,170,372],"class_list":["post-3305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","category-qi-macros","category-statistics","tag-attribute","tag-qi-macros","tag-six-sigma","tag-variable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3305"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4259,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305\/revisions\/4259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}