A Simple Crosstabulation

About this task

What factors affect the products that people buy? The most obvious is probably how much money people have to spend. In this example, we'll examine the relationship between income level and PDA (personal digital assistant) ownership.

Procedure

  1. From the menus choose:

    Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Crosstabs

    Note: This feature requires the Statistics Base option.

    Figure 1. Crosstabs dialog box
    Crosstabs dialog box with row and column variables selected
  2. Select Income category in thousands (inccat) as the row variable.
  3. Select Owns PDA (ownpda) as the column variable.
  4. Click OK to run the procedure.

What to do next

Figure 2. Crosstabulation table
The Income category in thousands * Owns PDA Crosstabulation table.

The cells of the table show the count or number of cases for each joint combination of values. For example, 455 people in the income range $25,000–$49,000 own PDAs. None of the numbers in this table, however, stand out in any obvious way, indicating any obvious relationship between the variables.

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