Title: Good Table Manners
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Association for Nominal and Ordinal Variables

Good Table Manners

There are, of course, rules of best practice when creating a table - what Cathie Marsh (1988) called 'goog table manners'. Tables should have a title, and make clear the source of data, the number of cases, and any important omissions such as missing data. In a cross-tabulation any cases that take a value defined as missing for any of the variables will be excluded from the analysis. However, the number of missing cases is not always mentioned, for example when the number is very small in relation to the overall number of cases, or when a particular variable is not relevant for a large number of cases.

Each of the variables and values should be labelled clearly. These labels should be clear and easy to understand. If you are working from a dataset you will likely want to use phrases other than the shorthand labels used in your dataset.Similarly to a frequency table a contingency table is composed of (vertical) columns, (horizontal) rows, and cells (boxes), but there are a number of options for how we choose to present the data in relation to each of these elements. A common convention is that the columns of the table represent the values of the independent variable and the rows represent the values of the dependent variable. .

For our purposes, presenting data in tables is only the first step in how we understand the relationship between two categorical variables.