How to get descriptive statistics on questionnaire items by group using SPSS?

Question

I have carried out an evaluation of a product using likert scale questionnaire and imported the date into SPSS. I have my columns arranged as follows:

ID, Group, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4

I have two different groups completing the questionnaire, with each person a different numerical ID. Under the Q columns, I have the score given for that person (from 1-5) from the Likert Scale.

In all there are over 300 responses.

I am running analysis using 'descriptive statistics/frequencies' from the menubar and not getting the tables I am looking for. Basically, it is including all respondents together, whereas I would like it to compare the two groups in the tables.

How can I get descriptive statistics on questionnaire items by group using SPSS?

In addition, if you have any further tips as to what analysis I could perform on this type of data in SPSS I'd be most grateful. I'd like to show that there isn't a significant difference in opinions between the groups, and from looking at the data, it appears that this is the case.

Answer 1

One option

• split file by group
• run descriptive statistics as usual

See this SPSS FAQ item from UCLA on how to analyze data by categories.

Answer 2

The short answer to you question is, crosstabs Q1 to Q4 by group. will produce the table you want. Or if you have the ctables package available a more compact table will be produced by

variable level group_id Q1 to Q4 (nominal).
ctables
/table Q1 + Q2 + Q3 + Q4 by group_id.

Either can be elaborated on to produce other statistics if wanted. It seems to me a chi-square test would be sufficient for your question.

As far as further analysis it is a bit of an open-ended question that needs more focus to be able to effectively answer. I frequently suggest visual exploration for such exploratory analysis, and hence I would suggest perusing this question on the site, Visualizing Likert responses using R or SPSS for potential ideas about how to visualize the responses. Another motivating post may be How to visualize 3D contingency matrix?.

There are a ton of other questions related to analyzing likert responses on this site though, and it is difficult to give any more specific advice without a more specific motivation for the analysis.