Factor analysis is used to find factors among observed variables. In other words, if your data contains many variables, you can use factor analysis to reduce the number of variables.
If you want to test whether the % of people who report themselves to be very happy has changed during the time that the test has been conducted. A special case of the chi square test for independence is the test.
A chi square (X2) statistic is used to investigate whether distributions of categorical variables differ from one another. Categorical variables like; gender of sample population which could be either male or female.
When using this statistical test, you are testing the null hypothesis that 2 population means (average) are equal. The alternative hypothesis is that they are not equal.
In my previous article “Introducing Data” we discussed about importing files and creation of data sheet in SPSS. Moving further, in this article I will be discussing about the most basic technique which can be applied within SPSS i.e. Frequency Testing.
If your data isn’t already in a computer-readable SPSS format, you can enter the information directly into the SPSS Data Editor (See Article Importing Files and creating datasheet in SPSS).
In SPSS researcher can specify the level of measurement as scale (numeric data on an interval or ratio scale), ordinal, or nominal. Nominal and ordinal data can be either string alphanumeric or numeric. Each of these have been explained below in detail.