QUANTIFICATION OF QUALITATIVE VARIABLES IN BUSINESS SURVEYS

The data of business (market) surveys of entrepreneurial activity are an important source of economic information in national and international practice. Their results reflect the specific features of cognitive perception by business agents of business trends and sectoral cyclical events in various sectors of the country’s economy. Using the appropriate measurement procedures for the processing of structured distributions of entrepreneurial opinions makes it possible to obtain arrays of information that are the so-called «soft» non-quantitative statistics in the «near real-time» mode.

When analyzing the results of business surveys, first of all, there are the tasks of their quantitative characterization, measuring the relationships between the qualitative characteristics of the objects surveyed and the generalization of the interrelated information into summary indicators characterizing the scale of the distribution of cyclical industry events in the economic development of the country. In this regard, the authors present the main stages and methods for quantifying the results of surveys, in particular the procedure for scaling qualitative characteristics, their quantitative determination; the possibility of applying specific statistical measures is justified. For the generalized measurement of qualitative information, the concepts of horizontal and vertical integration of survey results are introduced. The questions of adequate and logical interpretation of balance statistics, based on subjective assessments of respondents, are considered. The authors formulated reasons for combining the results of the surveys into composite indicators, which make it possible to identify the most characteristic links among simple survey indicators and simplify the analysis and interpretation of the results as a whole.

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