A Step by Step Guide for SPSS and Exercise Studies

Statistical tests 47
Dialog box 48
example, if you are interested in the 90th percentile, that is, in those individuals
whose scores on extrinsic motivation are higher than 90% of the sample, the
Output window will tell you that these individuals have a score of 7 on the
extrinsic motivation scale. Quartiles present the values for the 25th, 50th, and
75th percentile, that is, they give the cut-off points for 4 equal groups (Table 6).
In Dialog box 47 click Charts. For each selected variable, SPSS can produce
either a bar chart, a pie chart or a histogram. The values in the charts can
represent the number of cases (frequencies) or the percentage of cases for each
category of a variable (e.g., number of males and females) (Dialog box 49).
Click Continue and you will get back to Dialog box 47. Then click Format.
Here you can specify how you want the values of the selected variables to
appear in the frequency tables (Dialog box 50).
For example, a frequency table showing the main sport of a group of pupils
can be ordered by ascending or descending values. Note that you must have
assigned a value to each sport in the data file, for example, 1 to aerobics, 2 to
badminton, etc. The frequency list can also be sorted starting from the least
popular sport (ascending counts) or the most popular sport (descending counts).
Note that all sports should be in one column in the data file with the name
activity.
If you would like to present the descriptive statistics (e.g., M, SD) of the
activity variable at the bottom of Table 7, select the Statistics Table (i.e., Table
6) and go to Run Script in the Utilities Menu. Select the Frequencies
footnote.sbs and click Run. Another useful script is the Make totals bold. sbs.
For more information on using scripts, see the Utilities Menu in Chapter 5.
In Dialog box 50 you can also indicate whether you want SPSS to present the
descriptive statistics of all variables in one table (compare variables), or separately