m38 problem set STATISTICS

BIVARIATE ANALYSIS:

Constructing and interpreting crosstabs

Univariate analysis provides you information about individual variables. Bivariate analysis explores relationships between two variables. Running crosstabulations or “crosstabs” is one way to do this. A crosstab is a matrix that shows the distribution of one variable for each category of a second variable. Let’s construct a crosstab for 2 variables found in the General Social Survey (GSS): gender (SEX) and general happiness.

To run a crosstab on SPSS, go to: Analyze, Descriptive Statistics, Crosstabs

Highlight variable name, click on arrow pointing toward Row box

Highlight variable name, click on arrow pointing toward Column box

Your screen should look like this:

Click OK. Your screen should look like this:

What does this cross tab mean? This is relatively easy to interpret. Approximately 28% of the males are very happy and about 29% of the females have identified themselves as very happy. But what about a crosstab that has many attributes? For example, what if you wanted to analyze the relationship between the number of children that you have and your general happiness? This is the crosstab for that analysis:

This is far more complicated to analyze with a crosstab. That is why we will consider measures of association in the next content guide.