Reading A Table

Edited 11/09/04.

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

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

1. Obtain a frequency of your independent and dependent variables first to make sure they do indeed vary in your data. In other words ensuring that all your data do not fit into single classifications such as being nearly all male, or nearly all female.
2. Create a table with your dependent and independent variables. There are other possibilities such as determining the correlation between two variables.
3. Interpret the distributions in the table in terms of the percentage differences across rows.
4. Read the marginals, row and column totals to determine the distributions of the variables in the sample.
   
5. Look at appropriate significance statistics to determine if your table distributions are significant (are not likely to have occurred by chance)
6. If the data is appropriate with above configeration, compare diffirences in means for across independant categories
7. Create or read the table fotter which should contain specific information about the data (source, time, etc.)

Table Exercise