Reading A Table (edited 02/24/08)

Table for abany by relig

 

Table Conventions: Creating and Reading a Table (interpreting the distributions in a table)

Table conventions

Typically for a computer statistical analysis of survey data, you:

  1. Create a table with the independant variable as the column and the dependant variable as the row with column percentages. 
  2. Read the marginals, row and column totals:
  3. Interpret the distributions in the table in terms of your hypothesis by comparing differences across rows.
  4. Look at appropriate significance statistics to determine if your table distributions are significant (are not likely to have occurred by chance)
  5. If the data is appropriate with above configeration, compare diffirences in means across independant categories
  6. Create or read the table footer which should contain specific information about the data (source, time, etc.)
Table Exercise
 
HINT: If your independent variable has too many categories to run across a page, simply make it the row variable and calculate (row) and compare percents (column)
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