Tables for Variables with Shared Categories

Surveys often contain many questions with a common set of possible responses. For example, our sample survey contains a number of variables concerning confidence in various public and private institutions and services, all with the same set of response categories: 1 = A great deal, 2 = Only some, and 3 = Hardly any. You can use stacking to display these related variables in the same table--and you can display the shared response categories in the columns of the table. These features are also available if you use computed categories, with the provision that any computed category's label and expression are the same in all variables.

Note: In the previous version of Custom Tables, this was known as a "table of frequencies."

Sample Data File

The examples in this section use the data file survey_sample.sav. See the topic Sample Files for more information.

All examples provided here display variable labels in dialog boxes, sorted in alphabetical order. Variable list display properties are set on the General tab in the Options dialog box (Edit menu, Options).