Example: Examining Interrelations of Social Systems

This example examines Guttman’s ¹ adaptation of a table by Bell ². The data are also discussed by Lingoes ³.

Bell presented a table to illustrate possible social groups. Guttman used a portion of this table, in which five variables describing such things as social interaction, feelings of belonging to a group, physical proximity of members, and formality of the relationship were crossed with seven theoretical social groups, including crowds (for example, people at a football game), audiences (for example, people at a theater or classroom lecture), public (for example, newspaper or television audiences), mobs (like a crowd but with much more intense interaction), primary groups (intimate), secondary groups (voluntary), and the modern community (loose confederation resulting from close physical proximity and a need for specialized services).

The following table shows the variables in the dataset resulting from the classification into seven social groups used in the Guttman-Bell data, with their variable labels and the value labels (categories) associated with the levels of each variable. This dataset can be found in guttman.sav. See the topic Sample Files for more information. In addition to selecting variables to be included in the computation of the categorical principal components analysis, you can select variables that are used to label objects in plots. In this example, the first five variables in the data are included in the analysis, while cluster is used exclusively as a labeling variable. When you specify a categorical principal components analysis, you must specify the optimal scaling level for each analysis variable. In this example, an ordinal level is specified for all analysis variables.

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