In this post you will learn how to create a bar chart in spss.
Simple Bar Chart –
Let’s read a dataset to work with. click here to download
Open spss and go to File > Open > data and select the data that you have downloaded. The data will look like this-
Here, we have data of 20 men and 20 women and we showed half of each sample a film that was supposed to be a chick flick (Bridget jones’s diary) and the other half of each sample a film that didn’t fall into the category of chick flick (like Memento). And in all cases we measured their arousal as an indicator of how much they enjoyed the film.
To create a bar chart, go to Graphs > chart builder. Then select bar chart. you will see a dialog box like this.
Now Let’s plot the mean rating of the two films. We have just one grouping variable (the film) and one outcome (the arousal), therefore we want a simple chart. In the chart builder double click on the icon for a simple bar chart. On the canvas you will see a graph and two drop zones. one for the y-axis and one for the x-axis. The y-axis needs to be the dependent variable or the thing you’ve measured or more simple the thing for which you want to display the mean. In this case it would be arousal, so select arousal from the variable list and drag it into the y-axis drop zone. The x-axis should be the variable by which we want to split the arousal data. To plot the means for the two films, select the variable film from the variable list and drag it into the drop zone for the x-axis. Next select display error bars icon. Your dialog box will look like this-
Click on OK to create the Bar chart.
This graph displays the means (and the confidence interval of those means) and shows us that on average, people were more aroused by Memento than they were by Bridget Jones’s Diary. To see the gender effect, we need to create a clustered bar chart. Let’s do that.
Clustered Bar Chart –
To do a clustered bar chart, we need to double click on the clustered bar chart icon in the chart builder.
On the canvas you will see a graph with the simple bar chart but there is now an extra drop zone – clustered on x: set color. All we need to do is drag our second grouping variable into this drop zone. As with the previous example, select arousal from the variable list and drag it into y-axis. then select film from the variable list and drag it into x-axis. In addition, select the Gender variable and rag it into cluster on x: set color. This will mean that bars representing males and females will be displayed in different colors. Then select display error bars in the dialog box. It should look like this.
Click on OK to create the clustered bar chart.
Like the simple bar chart, this graph tells us that arousal was overall higher for Memento than for Bridget Jone’s Diary, but it also splits this information by gender. The mean arousal for Bridget Jones’s Diary shows that males were actually more aroused during this film than females. This indicate they enjoyed the film more than the women did. Contrast this with Memento, for which arousal levels are comparable in males and females. On the face of it, this contradicts the idea of a chick flick. It actually seems that men enjoy chick flicks more than females do.