Frequencies
This feature requires the Statistics Base option.
The Frequencies procedure provides statistics and graphical displays that are useful for describing many types of variables. The Frequencies procedure is a good place to start looking at your data.
For a frequency report and bar chart, you can arrange the distinct values in ascending or descending order, or you can order the categories by their frequencies. The frequencies report can be suppressed when a variable has many distinct values. You can label charts with frequencies (the default) or percentages.
Example. What is the distribution of a company's customers by industry type? From the output, you might learn that 37.5% of your customers are in government agencies, 24.9% are in corporations, 28.1% are in academic institutions, and 9.4% are in the healthcare industry. For continuous, quantitative data, such as sales revenue, you might learn that the average product sale is $3,576, with a standard deviation of $1,078.
Statistics and plots. Frequency counts, percentages, cumulative percentages, mean, median, mode, sum, standard deviation, variance, range, minimum and maximum values, standard error of the mean, skewness and kurtosis (both with standard errors), quartiles, user-specified percentiles, bar charts, pie charts, and histograms.
Frequencies Data Considerations
Data. Use numeric codes or strings to code categorical variables (nominal or ordinal level measurements).
Assumptions. The tabulations and percentages provide a useful description for data from any distribution, especially for variables with ordered or unordered categories. Most of the optional summary statistics, such as the mean and standard deviation, are based on normal theory and are appropriate for quantitative variables with symmetric distributions. Robust statistics, such as the median, quartiles, and percentiles, are appropriate for quantitative variables that may or may not meet the assumption of normality.
To Obtain Frequency Tables
This feature requires the Statistics Base option.
- From the menus choose:
- Select one or more categorical or quantitative variables.
Optionally, you can:
- Click Statistics for descriptive statistics for quantitative variables.
- Click Charts for bar charts, pie charts, and histograms.
- Click Format for the order in which results are displayed.
This procedure pastes FREQUENCIES command syntax.