What type of data do sociologists receive from survey research?

I'm writing a paper for my sociology class and one of the points I have to address is what type of data so sociologists receive from survey research? I've spent most of my time on this paper just trying to find the answer to this question. I need help or at east some other site suggestions.What type of data do sociologists receive from survey research?
the key distinction in research methods is between
quantitive and qualitative methods

for more details about this difference, how it applies to specific forms of survey research, and to your question, see
http://www.fhi.org/nr/rdonlyres/etl7vogs鈥?/a>
scroll down to the section headed 'Comparing Qualtitative and Quantitative Research' and look especially at the table listing the benefits of the two major approaches for a detailed argument for using the quantitative survey method

there are several other useful simlar web sites if you enter the terms
'research methods quantitative qualitative' into the 'Google' search engineWhat type of data do sociologists receive from survey research?
A survey is used (usually) to gauge public opinion about almost anything. Most of the common ones are crime surveys, market surveys and census surveys.

Most surveys use numerical data (e.g. 'Rate how you feel about ___ from 1 to 5') this kind of data would be quantitative data. Questions like: 'Which stores do you shop at?' with a tick-box answering system are also quantitative, since you can say so and so many people shop at certain stores. Sometimes open-ended questions like: 'Please describe your reasons for shopping at this store' with a space for people to write their answers can be either quantitative or qualitative. Really a question like this should be tick-boxes but for a less biased answer (cause it directs someone to think 'yeah, i'll just pick that') an open-ended type answer system is used.

If a question like that receive a lot of the same answers (price, location) then you can give numbers to the answers. This way when entering the answers into a spreadsheet (like in SPSS) it's an easier way to compile the data. If there are a lot of different answers, or you want a more comprehensive understanding of the subject (which is perhaps why you chose an open-ended question) that would be qualitative data.

Really since surveys are mainly paper based, the kind of data you would be get would be mostly quantitative....I realise you could have meant more specific types of data.

That would be nominal, ordinal and interval data.

Nominal: Basically something you can count e.g. number of boys and girls.
Ordinal: Ranking. Giving a number based on rank to things that normally aren't numbered. E.g. 'Rank these pets from 1 to 5 in order of preference. Dog, cat etc'
Interval: A scale in which each of the numbers have an equal difference between them. E.g. From 1-10 how do you feel about this product.