Annotated Further Reading

Frequency tables and crosstabs for categorical data are taught as an afterthought in most statistics books because of the type of data more frequently encountered in disciplines like psy­chology and the natural sciences. For this reason, it can be difficult to find extensive discussions of descriptive statistics for categorical data.

Halperin, S. and Heath, O. (2017) Political Research: Methods and Practical Skills, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For a discussion of the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics, see chapter 15 (‘Quantitative analysis: Description and inference’).

Marchant-Shapiro, T. (2015) Statistics for Political Analysis: Understanding the Numbers. London: Sage/CQ Press.
This book includes some basic instructions for using SPSS to conduct data analysis, and the examples are from political science. There is a discussion of crosstabs (‘contingency tables’) in chapter 8 (‘Describing the pattern: what do you see?’).

Pallant, J. (2016) SPSS Survival Manual. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education.
This book provides a functional overview of how to produce statistics in SPSS. See chapter 6 (‘Descriptive statistics’) for an overview of how to produce frequency tables. For the content associated with categorical descriptive statistics, focus on the section ‘Categorical variables’. For further information on producing crosstabs, see the section on chi squared tests in chapter 16 (‘Non-parametric statistics’).