Descriptive Statistics using SPSS: Categorical Variables

We have talked about descriptive statistics in general. Now, I would like to share with you how to work with categorical variables in terms of obtaining descriptive statistics for categorical variables. When you want to know how many people gave each responses (e.g. how many males and females in your samples), you should use Frequencies analysis. Frequencies is used for categorical data because it does not make any sense asking for means, standard deviations, maximum and minimum, etc. for categorical variables.

The procedure that you need to take for Frequencies analysis using SPSS 16.0 is the following steps:

1. From the menu at the top of the screen, click on Analyze, then click on Descriptive Statistics, then Frequencies.
2. Choose and highlight the categorical variables that you want to run for analysis (e.g., sex). Move these variables into the variables box.
3. Click on the Statistics button. In the Dispersion section, tick Minimum and Maximum. Click on Continue and then OK.

The output you generate from this analysis will look like the following figure:
The output shows that there are 635 males (41.9 per cent) and 880 females (58.0 per cent) in the sample, giving a total of 1515 respondents excluding two samples that had coded mistakenly.