Creating the cells of the table

Each cell of this table is defined by two conditions, one from the row and one from the column. In this table the conditions which define each row and column are shown in parentheses. They are not, of course, printed in ordinary tables of output. The top left cell contains 200 people. This is everyone in the sample, since the conditions creating this cell are ‘All Respondents’ and ‘Total Respondents’. The middle cell of the top row is defined by the conditions ‘All Respondents’ and ‘Male’, which is the condition that column 106 contains a ‘1’. The total number of male respondents is 44.

The second cell in the first column is defined by the two conditions ‘All respondents who are single’ and ‘All respondents’. A single respondent has a ‘1’ in column 109; there are 53 such respondents.

The second cell of the third row has the conditions Male (c106’1’) and Married (c109’2’). There are 23 married male respondents.

Each time a record passes through the tabulation section, the count in the top left cell is increased by 1, since this cell is to include all respondents. Each time a record comes through in which c106 is a ‘1’, the count in the middle cell of the top row is also incremented by 1 since this cell includes all respondents who are males.

Note Conditions are positive rather than negative; respondents are included because they fulfil the required conditions rather than being excluded because they do not fulfil them.

Many tables contain counts that are created by the existence of more than two conditions. An entire table may be filtered. This means that no one is considered for inclusion in the table at all unless they fulfil a condition specified for the table as a whole. For example, you might want to look at a table which includes only respondents who live in Central London. That condition is c121’1’ which is satisfied by 19 people as shown below.

Sample Table 2
Bread Purchase survey

Table 2 Page 2
Base: All respondents Absolutes
Living in Central London

Total Male Female
Respondents (c106'1') (c106'2')

Base 19 1 18
(All in C. Ldn)
Single 4 0 4
(c109'1')
Married 13 0 13
(c109'2')
Divorced 1 0 1
(c109'3')
Widowed 1 1 0
(c109'4')

In this table, the count for each cell is defined by three rather than two conditions. The second cell of the third column, for example, refers to all respondents living in Central London (c121’1’) who are female (c106’2’) and who are single (c109’1’). There are four people in this cell.