Examining frequencies for categorical variables

- Whenever you're beginning an analysis,…one of your most important tasks is to…get a sound understanding of the…individual variables that you're dealing with.…That way you can understand whether they meet…the assumptions or the statistical tests…that you'll do later, and how some of their…quirks might influence your interpretation.…SPSS offers several options for…basic descriptive statistics.…I'm going to start by showing you the frequencies command…for categorical variables as nominal or ordinal.…And especially the one-click descriptives that SPSS now has.…

For instance, what I'm going to do is,…I'm going to pick the income category variable,…and by clicking on the variable and…highlighting the whole thing, I can then…come up to this command right here.…That's the little Greek "mu"…for the mean that's on top of this.…And it says, "Run descriptive statistics."…Now, it knows that this is a categorical variable.…Let me show you how.…If I double-click on the name of this,…you see that over here it has its measure set as ordinal.…