Produce Descriptive Statistics using SPSS
Congratulations! You have completed the first step – data entry. Let’s move to the next step.
We always want to obtain a visual summary or checking the central tendency and dispersion of a variable. In this section, we will show you how to produce descriptive statistics of a survey data using SPSS. Descriptive statistics for a variable are provided by frequencies, measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) and dispersion (range, interquartile range and standard deviation). Meanwhile frequencies can also be visually displayed as bar charts, histograms, or pie charts.
Why bar charts, pie charts and histograms?
- Bar charts – flexible and allow us to compare values across categories.
- Pie charts – if you are looking at six or fewer different categories and can used for both nominal and ordinal data.
- Histogram – to summarise discreate or continuous data, often used to visualize the distribution of the data.
Alright, we believe you know well on how descriptive statistics help to describe, show and summarise the data in a meaningful way. Lets watch the video below to know how to produce descriptive statistics using SPSS.
VIdeo:
Reliability analysis is to test whether a group of items (i.e., the items measuring a construct generated from factor analysis) consistently reflected the construct it is measuring. It refers to the degree of consistency, and if a scale possesses a high reliability the scale is homogeneous.
Cronbach alpha always used to examine the internal consistency of the scales used in the study. A Cronbach’s alpha close to 1.0 indicates that the item is considered to have a high internal consistency reliability, above 0.8 is considered good, 0.7 is considered acceptable and less than 0.6 is considered to be poor (Sekaran, 2003).
To find the Cronbach alpha values using SPSS, lets watch this video:
To know on how to interpret the Cronbach alpha in SPSS, lets watch this video: