ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how students should read and interpret the frequency output from SPSS and shows how they should report it. A frequency distribution summarizes a variable’s scores. It shows how frequently each value or category of a variable occurs, expressing their frequency as absolute numbers and/or percentages. A frequency distribution is used when a specific research question asks about ‘how often’ or ‘to what extent’ something occurs. Hence, for example: how many women work for the government? In constructing frequency distributions for nominal and ordinal variables, the appropriate procedure involves a simple counting of values, although percentages may be used to provide a clearer view of the whole. The chapter alsio shows how students use the “Frequencies” procedure to check if they have made any errors when entering data. In some cases, it is sufficient to compute the frequency distribution of all the variables involved in the study.
