Controlling the descriptives display order

In addition to providing a quick overview of a dataset, descriptives can be used to focus on a set of related questions to compare them and set the stage for deeper analysis of them as a group. The General Social Survey includes a set of questions dealing with problems facing the United States and asks people to indicate whether the nation is spending too much money on the problem, too little, or the right amount. A response of too little is coded as 1, a response of about right is coded as 2, and a response of too much is coded as 3 in the dataset. To obtain a quick comparison of how some of these questions about national problems were rated in the 2016 survey, use the following menus:

Analyze | Descriptives Statistics | Descriptives

Select the six items shown in the following image from the list of fields on the left. Click on the Options button and, under Display Order, select Ascending means:

This will cause the fields to be sorted so that those with the lowest mean are at the top of the list. These are the problems that people think are receiving too little funding at present. Click on OK to obtain the table shown in the next image.

It is evident that childcare and alternative energy are the problems that people think should receive more funding. There are many handy features in SPSS, such as the ability demonstrated here to sort the results based on a statistic. These features are available as options so be sure to explore the secondary menus to see the choices you have:

A table of ordered means can be useful when looking at a set of questions from a customer or employee satisfaction survey. Typically, these survey questions employ a 1-5 rating from Highly Satisfied to Highly Dissatisfied so the items with the lowest mean score indicate areas of greatest satisfaction.