Title: Using software to obtain measures of association
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Association for Nominal and Ordinal Variables

Using software to obtain measures of association

Here is a video on measures of association in SPSS:

To calculate any measure of association in SPSS:

Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Crosstabs > Statistics (then tick the ones you want)

You can then select the tests that you want. These could include Chi square, Phi and Cramer’s V, Gamma, Tau or Lambda. Please note that SPSS will calculate a test result even if it is not appropriate for your data. It is up to you to select the appropriate test!

In addition to asking the software to calculate a particular statistic, we shall also ask it to show us the following values for each cell in the cross tab:

The observed count of cases,

The expected count of cases were there no association,

The residual (observed minus expected counts),

The column %,

Note that while we might want to produce a table such as this for our own purposes of analysis of the data, when reporting results we would want to keep the contents of a single table much simpler and clearer than this, so as not to confuse the reader.

[FOR SPSS: Note that SPSS produces the results for the asymmetric and symmetric measures in different tables (it calls asymmetric measures directional measures). Regardless of how you place the variables in your contingency table, SPSS calculates two values for Tau and Lambda, one for each direction of relationship.]