ABSTRACT
This chapter helps people to: understand hand and computer tabulation; understand that no one type of tabulation perfectly represents a data set; understand univariate analyses and frequency distributions; recognize bivariate analyses and cross-tabulations. The simplest form of data tabulation involves a single variable and is often called univariate, meaning one variable. There is no one way to tabulate data. No matter how data are tabulated, there will be some consolidation and lack of clarity. As people step back, they can begin to see patterns in the data; however, they also will begin to lose sight of micro-level trends in the data. In this sense, data tabulation is about the processing of coming to understand people's data rather than simply going through a checklist. For most research projects, however, people are far more likely to use computer tabulation. Here the data for each respondent or unit of analysis are entered into a computer program.
