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.

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Last updated: 10 November, 2006.

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