Exercise: Premature delivery and housing tenure, 3

Question 3: Produce a table suitable for a paper or a report with percentages of preterm and term births in each housing tenure groups.

Suggested answer

We choose Analyze, Descriptive Statistics, Crosstabs. Put the variable 'Housing tenure' into Row(s): and 'Prematurity' into Column(s):. Click Cells, Observed, Row, Continue. Click OK.

You should get the case processing summary and then the following:

Housing tenure * Prematurity Crosstabulation
Prematurity Total
  Term   Preterm
Housing tenure Owner-occupier Count 849 50 899
% within Housing tenure 94.4% 5.6% 100.0%
Council tenant Count 229 29 258
% within Housing tenure 88.8% 11.2% 100.0%
Private tenant Count 164 11 175
% within Housing tenure 93.7% 6.3% 100.0%
With parents Count 66 6 72
% within Housing tenure 91.7% 8.3% 100.0%
Other Count 36 3 39
% within Housing tenure 92.3% 7.7% 100.0%
Total Count 1344 99 1443
% within Housing tenure 93.1% 6.8% 100.0%

We now have to turn this into a table for presentation. One way is to put the count and the percentage side by side:

Prematurity by housing tenure
Prematurity Total
  Term   Preterm
n % n % n %
Housing tenure Owner-occupier 849 94.4% 50 5.6% 899 100.0%
Council tenant 229 88.8% 29 11.2% 258 100.0%
Private tenant 164 93.7% 11 6.3% 175 100.0%
With parents 66 91.7% 6 8.3% 72 100.0%
Other 36 92.3% 3 7.7% 39 100.0%
Total     1344     93.1%       99       6.8%     1443     100.0%

We could add the chi-squared test at the bottom of the table:

Prematurity by housing tenure
Prematurity Total
  Term   Preterm
n % n % n %
Housing tenure Owner-occupier 849 94.4% 50 5.6% 899 100.0%
Council tenant 229 88.8% 29 11.2% 258 100.0%
Private tenant 164 93.7% 11 6.3% 175 100.0%
With parents 66 91.7% 6 8.3% 72 100.0%
Other 36 92.3% 3 7.7% 39 100.0%
Total     1344     93.1%       99       6.8%     1443     100.0%
chi-squared = 10.50, d.f. = 4, P = 0.03

I have rounded chi-squared to two decimal places and the P value to one significant figure.


Back to Exercise: Premature delivery and housing tenure.

To Applied Biostatistics index.

To Martin Bland's M.Sc. index.

To Martin Bland's home page.

This page maintained by Martin Bland.
Last updated: 10 November, 2006.

Back to top.