Week 2 - Assignment 1: Organize Data

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Editing Graphs

Video Title: Editing Graphs

Originally Published: 2012

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: Brighton, United Kingdom

ISBN: 9781473995628

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473995628

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.<wbr>doi.<wbr>org/10.4135/9781473995628

ANDY FIELD: When I came to the idea of doing these little presentations to show various things in

SPSS, I thought, well, they're going to be much more interesting than reading the book. And it'd be

a nice little thing that people could go and watch and keep themselves entertained on those lonely,

cold nights. But I've just been kind of looking over

ANDY FIELD [continued]: some of (LAUGHING) the ones I've already done, and they're all terrible!

Really, really, really unbelievably boring. However, this one-- this one is going to be fantastic. And the

reason for that is because it's all about graphs.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And graphs are the most exciting thing in the universe. Really. So sit down

with a nice, big syringe of heroin, and off we go into the exciting world of graphs. Now in the book

chapter I spend quite a lot

ANDY FIELD [continued]: of time telling you how to draw different types of graphs. And that's all well

and good, but one of the things that it did mean is that I didn't really have a lot of space to talk about

how you can edit graphs in SPSS. And editing graphs can be quite a useful thing to do, because the

graphs that pop out of SPSS don't always look how you want them to look.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Now one of the kind of quite tragic things about-- [LAUGH] being me is that

you can get really quite excited [INAUDIBLE]. Perhaps that's the wrong word. But in a way excited

about a good graph. A good graph says a million words. And, you know, it's like looking at, I don't

know,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: a nice Picasso or something. It's just-- they're things of great beauty. But

when they're pink, they can be things of hideous ugliness. So edit your graphs to present your data

well. In the chapter I've gone for bloody pages about this, about how graphs should look and how

they should do this and they shouldn't do that.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And that's because I really am quite sad. However, so that you can all

impress me with your graphs-- in fact, I expect every single person watching this-- [LAUGH] it'll one

person, then-- that'll be my mother-- to email me your beautiful graphs.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And there'll be a cash prize of zero pence-- or that's "dollars," for the

American-- to the best graph that I receive. Although if you can get SPSS to make your graphs look

like a cat, then, well, I might send you something nice.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Anyway, in the book chapter we use an example, and I'm going to use that

example here, of men and women watching different types of films and looking at how aroused they

get by those films. And that arousal is supposed to indicate how much they like the film. And we used

two films-- Bridget Jones' Diary, which is supposed to appeal to women.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: It's, uh-- well, I don't know if this is a British thing, but it's known as a "chick

flick." Whereas Memento is-- well, it's kind of gender-nonspecific, really, so it should appeal equally, I

think, in theory. So we have these data. These are up on the screen now. And, to draw graph of them,

all we

ANDY FIELD [continued]: do is use SPSS Graph Menu and then the Chart Builder. Now the Chart

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Builder gives us a nice little window like this. And basically we have this canvas, here. "Canvas"

makes it sound like you're making a painting, which I kind of like. So you have a canvas on which to

create your masterpiece.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And it also gives you-- unlike if you were a great artist, they don't have

a number of templates that they can pick, but maybe they should. I don't know. You know, here's

template for a vase of sunflowers or whatever. But in SPSS it gives you some templates for graphs.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: There are bar charts. You can see there's a whole variety of bar charts

here, line charts, and so on and so forth, all explained in the book. All of it. Every single one. Now

we want to do a bar graph, so we go to the Bar menu. And what we end up wanting to do is what's

known as a "clustered bar chart." So we double-click on this. And, lo and behold, we get a nice little

clustered bar

ANDY FIELD [continued]: chart on our canvas. And we also get a window that tells us-- well, allows

us to set certain properties of the graph. Now, really, it's an absolute doddle to make it-- I'm sorry, I'm

just-- the minute I say things, I keep thinking, mmm, is that an English thing, "doddle"?

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Maybe. But anyway, hopefully you know what I mean. It's easy. It's really

easy to make a graph. What we want to do is we want to plot arousal levels on the y-axis. So there

we go. We just drag it over there. And we want to plot film along the x-axis. So the type of films, so

we can just drop onto the x-axis.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: So we've got Bridget Jones' Diary, then Memento. But also we want to split

these bars up by gender so we can have a look at the males and the females separately. So we can

drag Gender into our little cluster box over here. So there we go. Our graphic is done. Now the other

thing we can do is display error-bar graphs--

ANDY FIELD [continued]: uh, sorry-- error bars on the graphs. And, um-- well, in the book, again,

I think I probably dribble slightly manically about the wonders of error bars. So tick that, as well.

Anything you tick over here in the Properties box, we have to click on Apply to apply to the graph. So

we have some nice error bars.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: That's all there is to it. If you want to look at other types of graphs, then

have a play around, read the book, or just go to the cinema instead. Click on OK. And, in our Output

Viewer, we get a beautiful graph. Well, a graph.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Now the main purpose of this demonstration is to show you how to edit

this. Now, if you're-- well, you know, if you're a student doing a project or something, then chances are

you're going to want to print this out in black and white and not spend lots of money on color printing.

If you're doing a PhD, or if you're an academic and you're submitting something to a journal,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: again, typically you just want a black-and-white graph. So Having these

colored graphs that SPSS produces is not always what you want. So, to edit a graph, all we need to

do is just double-click on it. So we highlight it in the viewer and double-click on it, and it pops up in its

own little window known as the Chart Editor.

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ANDY FIELD [continued]: And basically you can pretty much edit any aspect of the graph. This is one

of the things that SPSS has really improved on in recent editions. You've got quite a lot of flexibility

now to mess around with your graph. So the first thing we can do is have a look at the background.

Now you'll notice, if you click on anything in the graph,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: it gets highlighted. So I just clicked on the bars. They got highlighted in

blue. If I click on the background, that gets highlighted in blue. So you can see what you're going to

edit by seeing what's surrounded by blue. So if we click on the background to edit it, we just do a

double-click. Having done that, we get this Properties window. Woo-woo.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And that allows us to change various things. Now, as far as the background

goes, well, we have this tab up here-- Fill and Border. So we can change the fill color. Our fill color at

the moment is this kind of revolting grey, and it's really quite pointless. We may as well just get rid of

it. So we can select Fill here.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And instead of that grey, why don't we make it transparent? Now this thing

here with a little slash through it, that's transparent color. I guess transparent isn't, strictly speaking, a

color, but anyway. It's transparent. So we could apply that. Anything we do in this Properties box, we

have to click on Apply for it to work.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: So, Apply, and whoa, the background's gone. Hurrah. But we can also--

WOW. Look, it's got a nasty border. Look at this border. We don't need that border. Do we need that

border? No. So we can select it again, check the border, and again make it transparent. And click on

Apply. There we go-- no border.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: That's looking better already. Minimalism-- it's the way forward. We can

also edit things like the axes. So if we select the y-axis, you can see it's highlighted in blue, which

tells us that that's what we're editing. And over here in the Properties, well, to start off with,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: we could edit the scale. So we can edit the range of scores displayed--

so the minimum, maximum, and the increment. So let's change this. SPSS by default has made the

maximum 40, but let's make it 35. Let's stretch the graph out a bit. So we can apply that.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: That's changed. But, by changing that, SPSS in its infinite wisdom has

decided that we want it to start at 5, which we don't. We want it to start at 0. So, again, we can change

that to 0. So notice, as we change these things, the Autos are getting switched off, which is a good

thing. But now-- now we've set those two things, SPSS says,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: well, let's have a major increment of 10. So it just goes 10, 20, 30. Well,

that's rubbish, too. Let's change that to 5 and apply that. Now that's starting to look quite good, in its

own special, little way. We can also change the lines. The line at the moment is a solid black line.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Well, we could change it. We can change it to one of these styles. So let's

have, say, a dotted or sort of dashed line. And notice that it's changed to dashed. At the moment it's

black. We could make that another color. So we could, for example, change it to lilac. There you go.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Obviously, that's disgusting and far, far too much like pink, for my taste. So

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we could make it green. Green's a much nice color. Make it green. There it is. It's green. Or we can

make it blue. So on and so forth. But, of course, realistically you're probably (LAUGHING) just going

to want it to be black. But, you know, the point is you could change if you wanted to.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: The other thing we can change is the labels of the axis and the tick marks.

So if we select this tab here, we can choose not to display the axis title. So we can deselect that, click

on Apply. Look-- the title's. I have no idea why you would want to do that, because you should always

label your graphs. So that's have it back.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: You can also choose whether to display the labels of the ticks. So, these

numbers. So you could get rid of that, if you wanted to, but again I have no idea why you would want

to. But you could. And you could get rid of the tick marks. So, these little horizontal lines. So you could

deselect Display Ticks, and they go away.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Let's put them back. But you can also change their positions. So, at the

moment, they stick outward from the axis. You can make them stick inward, instead. Or indeed you

can make them bisect the axis, like that. So you can change lots and lots of things. You can do much

the same if you select the x-axis, like so.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: We've got the same options, really. We can change the line. And at the

moment it's a solid black line, again. But I am going to change this to transparent. We don't really

need that line. Lines are for suckers. We can also change the labels and ticks. So, again, we could

choose not to display the axis title,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: although that's a pretty bad idea. We could choose not to display the labels,

although that's a pretty bad idea, too. We could choose not to display the ticks. Which, in this case,

well, we don't really need the ticks at all. No, they're just not doing anything, really. Also, if we go to

this Categories tab,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: well, we can do a few interesting things here. I've use the term "interesting"

fairly liberally. At the moment, we've got Bridget Jones' Diary displayed before Memento. Now this

list is the order in which the graph displays those two things. Now we can move them around. So we

could shift Memento up or, indeed, shift Bridget Jones' Diary down.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And if we click on Apply it switches them. So we've now got Memento

followed by Bridget Jones' Diary. If we switch them back the other way and apply, then they go back

the other way. And we can do the same with gender. So up here we've selected the variable Film, but

if you select the variable Gender, then again, at the moment we've got males followed by females.

But if we shift the order of these and click on Apply,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: they reverse. So this is quite good, because it means that if you ordered

your things in a certain way and you don't like how it looks, you've got quite a lot versatility to change

it round.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Now the other thing you can do is change the bars. So if we select the bars,

well, you can see that they're all selected. You've got various options here. So, for example, you can

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make the bars skinny or wide, like so. So then they've gone all skinny.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: Really skinny. I mean, that's horrible. Why would you do that? I like them

quite wide, so I set them wide. So they're actually touching each other, because they're friends. You

can also change the gap between the clusters. So we've got a gap here that we can either make very

wide by changing that.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: So now it's like the two films-- You know, one of them really smells. They

hate each other. They're at opposite ends of the room. Or we could make them, like, mega mega

mega mega mega mega mega close to them, so there's no gap between the clusters at all. I mean,

the defaults here are pretty good, to be honest. You know, you normally want a bit of a gap between

the two.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: But the point is that you can change it. The other thing you can do is you

can add effects. So, for example, you could add a shadow to the bars. But don't. Don't ever do this,

because shadows-- hideous-- unnecessary. Just-- they're just plain wrong.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And, even worse, you could add a 3D effect. But, oh my god, that's just

horrible. It doesn't-- well, it doesn't-- [LAUGH] it doesn't tell you anything. Don't do it. Look at those

error bars. They're just hideous, and you can't read them. So, although you can change these things,

don't. Because if you do-- if you do a graph that's 3D

ANDY FIELD [continued]: or has a shadow effect, (WHISPERING) the world will end. (SPEAKING)

Really, it ends. It's true. If you don't believe me, just try it. But on your head be it. Because, when the

world ends, all of the world will blame you for ending it. We can also change these colors by selecting

ANDY FIELD [continued]: the bars for the different categories separately. So we can select the female

bars. Notice now only the green ones are highlighted. And over here we've got, again, Fill and Border.

So we could change the outline color-- so, the line around it-- if we don't happen to like the color black

for a line, but, you know, it's a good color. Or we could change the fill color,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: which is currently green. But if you wanted, like, a nice, monochrome

graph, then you might want to change that to, say, white. And if we select the Male bars, we could

change the field from blue to, say, grey. So now we've got a nice kind of greyscale graph. Finally,

there's various buttons up here.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: And a lot of these relate to, uh-- well, you know, various things that you

might want to do. Like this is adding text to the graph, if we wanted to add some text. See? We can

add some text. [TYPING] "This is a graph." And you can do all sorts of other things.

ANDY FIELD [continued]: But one that I do want to draw your attention to is this one that looks a bit

like a portcullis on a castle. And that does grid lines. So, if you click on that, you get some grid lines

on your graph. And again, these are editable. So, for example, these vertical grid lines-- not really

very useful in this graph, so we could make them transparent,

ANDY FIELD [continued]: to get rid of them. In theory, you should be able to delete them, as well, by

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pressing Delete. Now these horizontal ones, well, maybe we don't want them to be big, thick lines like

that, so we might make them dotted. And we maybe we change them to grey. There. That's nice, isn't

it?

ANDY FIELD [continued]: So there you have it. Some nice grid lines, some pretty pointless text, and

a nicely edited graph. Once you've done all this stuff, you can simply close this window. And, in your

view--

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Editing Graphs