SWK 3401.4-2.1 Frequency Counts
Introduction
The purpose of this activity is to learn how to determine the frequency with which specific values of a categorical variable occur, using Excel. For example, in the coursebook, you read about the number of men in the study who entered the program voluntarily and how many were involuntarily referred by the court or other legal proceedings. First, you will learn to count the total number of cases in a data set (COUNT), then you will learn to count how many of each type there are (COUNTIF).
Instructions
- Open the file called leadlevels for frequency counts start.xlsx. You might recognize this as being the complete file for the data you learned to enter earlier in the course—children from rental versus family owned homes (hypothetical).
- The first question, how many children were in the study, is answered by highlighting the cells A2 to A180 (hold the “Shift” while scrolling down the column). Then, click on the tab in the top menu bar that says Formulas. Then click on the down arrow for menu options where it says ∑AutoSum. Select the option “Count Numbers” and look at the last cell you highlighted—that blank A180 cell. The answer should be sitting there: 178.
- Now, let’s turn to the second question: how many were living in each type of housing, 1 (rental) or 2 (family owned). The command we are going to use is COUNTIF. It wants us to designate the cell range of interest (here, it is B2:B179) and the value we wanted counted. Excel wants this value placed in “ “ marks, after a comma that follows our range designation with the whole designation in ( ). We will run this analysis twice, once for the value 1, and again for the value 2.
=COUNTIF(B2:B179, “1”) should be entered into an empty cell, perhaps B180.
=COUNTIF(B2:B179, “2”) should be entered into an empty cell, perhaps B181.
- Hopefully, you see the number 50 in cell B180, and the number 128 in cell B181. This means there were 50 children from rental homes and 128 from family owned homes in this study. (See the file called leadlevels for frequency counts finish.xlsx to compare if you wish.) Save your file to something meaningful since you will be using this file in the next activity.
- If you got these answers, then you have successfully completed this learning activity! Well done!
