Getting the descriptive statistics in SPSS is quick for one or many variables. Descriptive statistics are measures we can use to learn more about the distribution of the observations in variables to for analysis, transforming variables, and reporting. Each descriptive statistic has their own formula that we will not be covering in the guide, but we will walk through the interpretation of each.
Below is the SYNTAX for calculating the descriptive statistics
SYNTAX
DESCRIPTIVES VARIABLES=wages
/STATISTICS=MEAN STDDEV MIN MAX VARIANCE.
We can also calculate the descriptive statistics for multiple variables in one command line.
In this SYNTAX we are calculating the descriptive statistics for the variables wages, education, age, sex, and language. They include;
SYNTAX
DESCRIPTIVES VARIABLES=wages education age sex language
/STATISTICS=MEAN STDDEV MIN MAX VARIANCE.
Output
A
The output chart, “Descriptive Statistics”, shows us the sample size and the descriptive statistics that we specified in the SYNTAX. There are two rows in the chart, “wages” and “Valid N (listwise)” that tell the differences in values when there are missing observations for the variable “wages”.
We can see the two sample sizes (N) for both rows are equal, 4,147, and SPSS only shows us the scores for the top since they would be the same. Moving from left to right, the minimum value recorded among the observations is 2.30 and the maximum is 49.92. Quite the range!
The average wage value in this dataset is 15.5531 which is below the middle value of 26.11 ((49.92 – 2.30)/2), indicating the distribution of the data is skewed toward lower values. The standard deviation is 7.887, indicating there is a wide distribution of the data.
The variance, the standard deviation squared, is 62.143 that tells us how far each number is the from mean of the dataset.
