Training

With SPSS Tables, an add-on module to SPSS 16.0, you can have more control over how you build and edit your pivot tables. Surveys often ask a series of questions that are rated on the same scale (e.g., a seven-point scale that ranges from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree). SPSS Tables enables you to display these variables simultaneously so that you can easily compare across variables with shared categories.

In this example, you’ll build a table to display the data for three variables: Quality of operations staff, Quality of services staff, and Quality of administrative staff. Typically, you would create one table for each variable; something like this:

Then you’d create two additional tables for Quality of services staff and Quality of administrative staff so that you could compare the distributions among the three variables. With SPSS Tables, however, you can display the distributions of several variables simultaneously.

Begin by ensuring that that all the variables share the same response categories; in this instance you’ll use a five-point scale that includes very poor, poor, average, good, and very good. After opening SPSS Tables, go to the “Tables” tab and place each of your variables in a row. Then, go to the lower right-hand corner and change the category position from “default” to “row labels in column.”

Now you can easily compare your three variables across the categories:

You’ll notice, for example, that the services staff has markedly fewer “very good” ratings and more “poor” ratings than the operations staff or the administrative staff.

Tables for variables with shared categories can be created for any number of categories or variables; however, in order to facilitate comparisons you may want to limit the number of categories or variables to those that can easily fit on one page.