ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author covers the basic procedures to obtain histograms, bar graphs, line graphs, scatterplots and boxplots. If the students wish to follow along with the procedures described and they need to start IBM SPSS Statistics and open the file labelled survey.sav. The chapter gives instructions that are given on how to edit a graph to better suit the students needs. Inspection of the shape of the histogram provides information about the distribution of scores on the continuous variable. A bar graph can show the number of cases in specific categories, or it can show the score on a continuous variable for different categories. Basically, the students need two main variables—one categorical and one continuous. A line graph allows the students to inspect the mean scores of a continuous variable across different values of a categorical variable.