Entering contingency table in SPSS

Question

I have a contingency table of the form:

            # successful    # unsuccessful  Totals
Amateurs    14              1544            1558
Experts     7               17              24

I'm having trouble getting this data into SPSS v21 so I can analyze it (chi square). I've tried directly inputting the data like this and using Analyze> Descriptive Statistics>Crosstabs, but the analysis results are incorrect that way, separating them into strange categories and giving me a chi square value of 2. When I do the calculation by hand I get 144.2. If anyone has input as to how to get this correctly entered, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Answer 1

In this case you have two dichotomous variables: status (amateur/prof) and succes (succes/unsuccess). So there are (2*2=) four possible response patterns. Create one observation for each pattern and fill in its frequency in a separate variable. Then weight by this variable. Now each single record 'counts for' N records where N is the value on the frequency variable.

I'd probably code your example as follows:

data list free/status success freq.
begin data
0 0 1544
0 1 14
1 0 17
1 1 7
end data.

weight by freq.

value labels status 0 'Amateur' 1 'Professional' / success 0 'Failure' 1 'Success'.

set onumbers labels.

crosstabs status by success
/statistics chisquare.