This data file represents responses to the personality scale you answered last week. This was developed by Singelis (1994) and is intended to measure Self Construal. In this scale self-construal is 1) how independent you view yourself and 2) how interdependent you view yourself. This example data set is not the class responses. I am going to use it to show you how to generate descriptive statistics.
I will then give you the data set that represents the class responses and ask you to repeat the steps I will give here for the class responses.
As we discussed earlier each column represents a variable. Here there are 3 columns. The first column indicates which participant number each person is. The next column, independent, is how independent each person viewed themselves and the last column is interdependent which represents how interdependent each person viewed themselves. Each row is a person's response. So, in row 1 we can see the number 1 in the participant column. In the independent column we see the score 1.25 which indicates how independent the first participant was and in the interdependent column we see the value 5.25, participant 1's interdependent score. In the next row we see scores for participant 2 and so on. Which means, participant 11 they scored 4.25 for independent and, for example, participant 14 scored 6.25 for interdependent.
In this example data set there are 42 responses which mean 42 people completed the personality scale. Of interest to us is what the mean, median, mode, standard deviation and range (descriptive statistics) are for the independent responses.
To calculate this we click on analyze— we click descriptive statistics— and select frequencies. In the pop-up box that appears we move the name independent from the left box to the right box and click on the arrow to move it across. If we post across the wrong variable, for example interdependent, we can click on it in the right hand box and post it back to the left hand box. So now we have the variable of interest independent in the right hand box. Now, we click on statistics and tell SPSS the statistics we want created. We want the mean, the median, the mode, the standard deviation and the range so we select these options, click continue and click ok.
A new window now opens. This is the output window and this is where the results appear. Here we can see the mean score was 4.1964 which is 4.20 rounded to two decimal places; the median score is 4.38; the mode score is 4.75; the standard deviation is 1.49; and the range was 5.75.
Additionally, the upper case N is short hand for sample size so we can see here there were 42 responses and no missing responses. All 42 participants answered all the questions for the independent items on the scale.
We can now repeat the steps to calculate the statistics for the interdependent scores. Analyze - descriptive statistics - frequencies. We no longer want independent. We can remove this. I want interdependent. So post it across to the right hand side. If I click statistics, we can see SPSS has remembered the check box from the previous analysis. So I can click continue. Now I click ok.
Here now we have the output for the interdependent. We can see the mean score was 5.78. The median score was 6.12. The mode score was 6.50. And the standard deviation was 1.03. And the range for 4.25.