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Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis

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CHAPTER 2<br />

Contingency Tables<br />

Table 2.1 cross classifies a sample of Americans according <strong>to</strong> their gender and their<br />

opinion about an afterlife. For the females in the sample, for example, 509 said<br />

they believed in an afterlife and 116 said they did not or were undecided. Does an<br />

association exist between gender and belief in an afterlife? Is one gender more likely<br />

than the other <strong>to</strong> believe in an afterlife, or is belief in an afterlife independent of<br />

gender?<br />

Table 2.1. Cross Classification of Belief in Afterlife by<br />

Gender<br />

Belief in Afterlife<br />

Gender Yes No or Undecided<br />

Females 509 116<br />

Males 398 104<br />

Source: <strong>Data</strong> from 1998 General Social Survey.<br />

Analyzing associations is at the heart of multivariate statistical analysis. This<br />

chapter deals with associations between categorical variables. We introduce parameters<br />

that describe the association and we present inferential methods for those<br />

parameters.<br />

2.1 PROBABILITY STRUCTURE FOR CONTINGENCY TABLES<br />

For a single categorical variable, we can summarize the data by counting the number<br />

of observations in each category. The sample proportions in the categories estimate<br />

the category probabilities.<br />

An <strong>Introduction</strong> <strong>to</strong> <strong>Categorical</strong> <strong>Data</strong> <strong>Analysis</strong>, Second Edition. By Alan Agresti<br />

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.<br />

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