SPSS® 12.0 Command Syntax Reference

396 CTABLES
• Summary functions available only for scale variables require that you give the variable
name in parentheses, as in MEAN(AGE). Other functions, such as COUNT, do not require
a variable name, but you can supply one to restrict the sort.
• When a variable name is given and multiple logical tables are created through stacking,
the entire table is sorted based on the first logical table that includes the categorical variable
being sorted and the variable specified in the key.
• When a table contains more than one dimension, the sort is based on the distribution of
the key within the categories of the sorted variable without regard to the contents of the
other dimensions. Thus, given the table
CTABLES /TABLE A BY B + C /CAT VAR=A ORDER=A KEY=COUNT(A),
the rows are sorted according to the counts for the categories of A without regard to the
values of B and C. If there are no missing values in the other dimension, the result is the
same as sorting on the totals for that dimension, in this case B or C. If the other dimension
has an unbalanced pattern of missing values, the sorting may give unexpected results;
however, the result is unaffected by differences in the pattern for B and C.
• If the sort variable is crossed with stacked category variables, the first table in the stack
determines the sort order.
• To ensure that the categories are sorted the same way in each layer of the pivot table, layer
variables are ignored for the purpose of sorting.
Example
CTABLES
/TABLE CAR1 BY AGECAT
/CATEGORIES VARIABLES=AGECAT TOTAL=YES
/CATEGORIES VARIABLES=CAR1 ORDER=D KEY=COUNT.
Car
maker,
most
recent
car
American
Japanese
German
Korean
Swedish
Other
Age category
Less than
25 25 to 34 35 to 44 45 to 54 55 to 64 65 or older Total
Count Count Count Count Count Count Count
99 267 293 214 140 215 1228
73 136 140 107 66 104 626
18 91 69 63 36 61 338
23 77 88 45 35 50 318
18 32 46 20 24 25 165
11 24 43 32 19 24 153
• The first CATEGORIES subcommand requests a total across all age categories.
• The second CATEGORIES subcommand requests a sort of the categories of CAR1 in
descending order using COUNT as the key. The categories of CAR1 are sorted according
to the total counts.