SOAN 3120 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Marginal Distribution, Categorical Variable, Dependent And Independent Variables

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 3120
• Professor: Andrew Hathaway

Document Summary

To analyze categorical data we use the counts or percents of individuals that fall into various categories. To grasp information in a table we can first look at the distribution of each variable separately. The distribution of a categorical variable says how often each outcome occurred. The total column at the right of the table contains the total for each other the rows. The row totals give the distribution of opinions between the two variables. The distribution of the 2 variables alone are called marginal distributions because they appear at the right and bottom of the two-way table. We can display the marginal distribution of each variable by dividing each row total by the table total and converting to a percent. Each marginal distribution from a two way table is a distribution for a single categorical variable. When working with two way tables we have to calculate the loss of percents.