A Step by Step Guide for SPSS and Exercise Studies

4 Chart and table options
Graphs
SPSS offers a wide variety of charts which can be useful in exploring and
summarising your data. Some of these graphs will be presented here.
Bar
This is one of the most commonly used types of chart. Bars can represent different
categories of a variable or different variables. SPSS offers three types of bar chart:
Simple, clustered, and stacked (Dialog box 106). For each type, charts can be
produced for groups of cases, separate variables, orindividual cases.
Summaries for groups of cases
This option summarises the different categories of a variable, sometimes within
a summary function (e.g., mean score) of a second variable. Click Simple and
Define.
Suppose you want to plot a chart showing the different sports practised by a
group of pupils (Dialog box 107).
The sports are listed within a variable called activity. Move this variable into
the Category Axis box. Click Title. In Dialog box 108, you can give a title, a
subtitle, orafootnote to the bar chart. Click Continue.
Options in Dialog box 107 lets you specify whether you want any missing
values to appear as a separate category (bar) in the chart. Figure 51 presents a
frequency count (N of cases) of each sport. The most popular sport in this
sample is football.
In Dialog box 107, bars can represent the number of cases (as above),
cumulative number of cases, orpercentages for the different categories (i.e.,
sports) of the activity variable. In addition, you can summarise the different
categories of activity within a function of a second variable. For example, you can
show that pupils who play different sports have different enjoyment scores. From
dialog box 109, select Other summary function under the Bars Represent option.
Move the enjoy variable in the Variable box. SPSS will calculate the mean score
of this variable unless you change the summary function (see below). Click OK.