What is quantitative data gathering?

Whenever data about a sample is encoded numerically, or on some scale, this is quantitative data gathering. In the simplest case, the researcher can measure heights or weights of subjects; in other cases she might ask them to indicate their degree of agreement with some proposal, or their religious association. In each of these cases the experimental or survey result could be recorded with single numbers.

Sometimes this term is used to distinguish it from work that involves asking subjects for their narratives or other input that cannot be easily encoded as described above.