Final answer:
When collecting social media posts with a specific hashtag, the data is considered Unstructured due to its qualitative, text-based nature. Systematic analysis can reveal patterns and insights, and while it's qualitative, quantitative insights can still be derived.
Step-by-step explanation:
When you collect social media posts with a specific hashtag for an analysis of the words used in the post, the kind of data you are dealing with is typically considered Unstructured data. This type of data includes textual posts, which usually contain variable-length text and often include colloquial language, abbreviations, and can be accompanied by multimedia elements such as images and videos. Because of its nature, unstructured data can be more challenging to analyze and process using conventional data tools and techniques, requiring more advanced methods such as natural language processing and content analysis to extract valuable information.
However, with careful and systematic analysis of this qualitative data—centered on words and meanings rather than numerical values—you can uncover patterns and insights into user behavior, opinions, and trends associated with the hashtag. Moreover, while qualitative in nature, you may derive quantitative insights, such as the frequency of certain words or phrases, from this unstructured social media data.