Exam 4: Frequency Distributions

To construct a frequency distribution for a variable at the ordinal level of measurement, we arrange the rows for the quantitative values of the variable in ascending order.

The term frequency can refer to:

Grouped frequency distributions combine some or all of the categories of a variable into a smaller number of categories.

At the end of one year, the board of a small mental health agency in an urban area urges its staff to modify its services and improve its outreach efforts so as to increase the number of ethnic minorities who utilize its services.At the end of the next year, the agency's executive director informs the board in her annual report that the agency's proportion of ethnic minority clientele increased by 50 percent -- from 2 out of 50 (4%) to 3 out of 50 (6%).The board members should:

Which of the following statements is true about combining categories in a grouped frequency distribution?

Frequency distributions transform a mass of unmanageable details of data into manageable summaries.

The sums of absolute or relative frequencies are called cumulative frequencies.

To calculate the proportion of cases for a category of a variable, we simply divide the number of cases in that category by the total number of cases that have provided data for that variable.

Cross-tabulation tables:

Suppose you want to display data from a large survey for a variable with many different scores that range from zero to 100.Which of the following would best facilitate and simplify the interpretation of the data?

An absolute frequency distribution will:

Increases or decreases in percentages are never misleading, regardless of whether they are based on a relatively small or large number of cases.

Displays of the proportions or percentages of cases per category are called:

The best way to facilitate and simplify the interpretation of data collected in a large survey is to:

Describing the number of cases in each category of each variable in narrative form prevents readers from getting overwhelmed by tables of statistics.

A cumulative frequency distribution will:

Displays that show how the absolute and relative frequencies of cases per category add up as we go from one category to the next are called:

To construct an absolute frequency distribution, you'll need columns that show proportions and percentages for each category of the variable.

To simplify a frequency distribution for a variable that contains a large number of categories, it is often helpful to create:

When constructing grouped frequency distributions, always create categories with the same number of cases per category.