Explore and Crosstabs

In some instances variables are multi-leveled. Gender, for example, is a variable with two only levels--male and female. Socioeconomic status also has levels, but the options are greater than for gender. While gender has two and only two levels, depending upon your research question you, the researcher, can define SES as either a two-level variable (high SES and low SES) or as a three-level variable (high, middle and low SES). In a data set with multi-leveled variables you may wish to examine how the levels of certain variables interact.  In the brief example just presented, you may wish to determine the distribution of females across all three SES levels in order to learn how many women are in the low, medium, and high SES levels. SPSS allows you to do this within the Explore and Crosstabs functions.

Explore

Analyze-->Descriptives-->Explore

Choose any measure from the list of variables in the dialog box. Position the cursor over the variable, left click to highlight it, then press the direction button to the right of the variable list. The highlighted variable now moves to the "Dependent List" box on the right. Chose now a second variable. Position the cursor over the second variable, left click to highlight it, then press the direction button to the right of the variable list. The highlighted variable now moves to the "Factor List" box on the right. Although there are many options available within the

Explore function, for getting-to-know-the-data purposes no further choices need to be made. Click the OK button and observe your results in the Output Editor.

Notice that in the Case Summary Processing box frequencies are reported by category--for instance, how many subjects, both male and female, fall into each of the SES categories. This piece of information provides you with valuable insight into the distribution of your data points. Below the Case Summary Processing box is the Descriptives box which reports, in detail, descriptive data on each level of the independent variable.

Crosstabs

Analyze --> Descriptives --> Crosstabs

To get frequency counts on the distribution of one variable across all levels of another variable use the Crosstabs function. In the dialog box you choose which variable you wish to appear in rows and which in columns. Move your choices to the appropriate box, and click OK. (Like Explore, there are many additional options within Crosstabs which you are encouraged to investigate independently.) A small, clearly labelled table appears in Output Editor providing you the exact counts by category. You may wish to compare the results of this analysis to those for Explore. As you'll see, much of the information is the same. This illustrates a valuable lesson within SPSS: there is oftentimes more than one way to get the information you seek.