Group Summaries in Categories

You can use categorical variables as grouping variables to display scale variable summaries within groups defined by the categories of the categorical variable.

  1. Open the table builder (Analyze menu, Tables, Custom Tables).
  2. Drag and drop Gender from the variable list into the Columns area of the canvas pane.

    If you right-click Gender in the table preview on the canvas pane, you will see that Summary Statistics is disabled on the pop-up menu. This is because in a table with scale variables, the scale variables are always the statistics source variables.

  3. Click OK to create the table.
Figure 1. Grouped scale summaries using a categorical column variable
Grouped scale summaries using a categorical column variable

This table makes it easy to compare the averages (mean and median) for males and females, and it clearly shows that there isn't much difference between them--which may not be terribly interesting but might be useful information.