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Descriptive Analysis

The document describes how to use SPSS to analyze frequency distributions and descriptive statistics for a variable measuring perceived gang activity in a school. It explains how to generate a frequency table in SPSS displaying the number of respondents for each category of the variable (yes, no, not sure) as well as percentages. A histogram is also generated to visualize the frequency distribution across categories.

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68 views2 pages

Descriptive Analysis

The document describes how to use SPSS to analyze frequency distributions and descriptive statistics for a variable measuring perceived gang activity in a school. It explains how to generate a frequency table in SPSS displaying the number of respondents for each category of the variable (yes, no, not sure) as well as percentages. A histogram is also generated to visualize the frequency distribution across categories.

Uploaded by

api-270984424
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Descriptive Analysis

Research Question Is there any gang activity in your school?


Analysis The frequencies test in SPSS will allow me to view frequency distributions and will compute a
descriptive summary statistics which will include the mean, median, and mode for my variables.
Step-By-Step and Interpretation Begin your test by clicking ANALYZE menu in SPSS. Under the submenu for DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS click FREQUENCIES for the nominal variable, gang activity. The
FREQUENCIES dialogue box will open. Select the variable of interest which is gang activity in the lefthand list and use the arrow to move it to the right-hand list. Click OK.
The OUPUT window will appear:

The next chart is a FREQUENCY TABLE which is noted as the basic output for my research question
The STATISTICS chart (green arrow) is the first chart we look at. Here we how many people are in each
measure. We see that there were 2,368 individual VALID responses and 3 MISSING responses. The mode
is 3, meaning the most common response is 3 which is coded for the response NOT SURE. The
Standard Deviation is .880. Standard Deviation is a measure of scattering around the mean. Because this
is a nominal variable a mean cannot be determined because you cannot determine an average of a
nominal variable. Also, note that because this is a nominal variable you cannot determine the median
which is the middle value after ranking the responses in order from least to greatest. Therefore, the SD
is invalid. The minimum and maximum determines the minimum and maximum value for the variable.
The minimum is 1 which is coded for YES and the maximum is 3 which is coded for NOT SURE.
For the 2nd chart titled, is the FREQUENCY TABLE (red arrow) which is the basic output for my research
question Is there gang activity in your school we have 733 students responded YES, 445 students
responded NO, and 1,190 students responded NOT SURE. That column displays the number of the

total population in each group, the next column displays the percent in each group as a proportion of
just the individuals with complete data, and this is titled as VALID PERCENT. The last column is the
CUMULATIVE PERCENT which is calculated as each new group is added to the previous group. For
example, if you add yes and no together you will get 49.7% (blue arrow).
Lets look at a visual graphical output of the frequencies of responses for gang activity
Below is the histogram (graphical output). The histogram shows the number of individuals in each
category.

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