Measures Of Central Tendency And Dispersion With SPSS Essay Sample

We select AGE as metric variable and MARITAL STATUS as a nominal variable.

Statistical assumptions: to calculate measures of central tendency and variation the data must be at least interval or ratio, do not have extreme values and not skewed too much.

We want to calculate measures of central tendency and dispersion for age variable by marital status:

EXAMINE VARIABLES=AGE BY MARITAL /PLOT BOXPLOT /COMPARE GROUP /STATISTICS DESCRIPTIVES /CINTERVAL 95 /MISSING LISTWISE /NOTOTAL.

And we add a box plot to describe the data

The data shows the following:
The most often widowed pairs are those who are older than 60 years. Those who were never married are from 20 to 40 years, 31 years old on average. The statistics of married are generally similar to divorced – these people are from 40 to 60 years old with a mean value approximately at 50 years. However, there are many outliers for never married group: some old people (who older than 60 years) are still single. Also, there are two outliers in widowed group – two young persons (approximately 30-32 years old) are already widowed.
The numbers of observations report that there are 790 married, 106 widowed. 212 divorced, 55 separated and 333 never married. Despite the fact that the majority of respondents are married, it causes worry that their number is approximately equal to the sum of all other groups (who have different problems with marriage).

References

Argyrous, G. Statistics for Research: With a Guide to SPSS. London: SAGE. ISBN 1-4129-1948-7.
Levesque, R. (2007). SPSS Programming and Data Management: A Guide for SPSS and SAS Users (4th ed.). Chicago, Illinois: SPSS Inc. ISBN 1-56827-390-8.