You have collected all of your
quantitative data, entered it into SPSS or other statistical software (or
downloaded it), and double-checked your data entry. Great… now what?? It can
feel intimidating to view your first real data set and know you need to figure
out what to do with it. I like to get started with an overall feel for what is
going on by calculating means and frequencies. Let us take a moment and review
what to use when.
If your variable is continuous,
meaning there are no categories you set up previous to the study, you can
calculate means and standard deviations. An example of a continuous variable
would be where you asked people to enter their age today (e.g., 32, 56, etc.).
Examples of categories would be gender: 1 = female, 2 = male or age: 1 = 20-30,
2 = 30-40, etc. Hopefully, these terms are sounding familiar, if not go back to
your statistics book and review. A good reference for SPSS is Pallant (2013).
For categorical variables (e.g.,
gender, education level), you can do a frequency table and get a feel for how
your data look. Make sure you do not have any data entry errors, they will show
up as a weird number, e.g., you have gender coded as 1 & 2 and 21 shows up
in the frequency table. Go back to the original data and double-check it.
Next time we will further consider quantitative analyses. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like
me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me
your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu
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