11.1.2 - Two-Way Contingency Table

Recall from Lesson 2.1.2 that a two-way contingency table is a display of counts for two categorical variables in which the rows represented one variable and the columns represent a second variable. The starting point for analyzing the relationship between two categorical variables is to create a two-way contingency table. When one variable is obviously the explanatory variable, the convention is to use the explanatory variable to define the rows and the response variable to define the columns; this is not a hard and fast rule though.

MinitabExpress  – Constructing a Two-Way Contingency Table

  1. Open the data set:
  2. On a PC: Select STATISTICS > Cross Tabulation and Chi-square
    On a Mac: Select Statistics > Tables > Cross Tabulation and Chi-Square
  3. Select Raw data (categorical variable) from the drop down menu
  4. Double click the variable Smoke Cigarettes in the box on the left to insert the variable into the Rows box
  5. Double click the variable Biological Sex in the box on the left to insert the variable into the Columns box
  6. Click OK

This should result in the two-way table below:

Tabulated Statistics: Smoke Cigarettes, Biological Sex
Rows: Smokes Cigaretes | Columns: Biological Sex
  Female Male All
No 120 89 209
Yes 7 10 17
All 127 99 226
Cell Contents: Count
Video Walkthrough

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