The first step in preparing survey data for presentation in a statistical table is to convert the data into quantitative form. One of the most popular ways of doing this is to assign a numeric value to responses. Many surveys, for example, use a Likert scale of responses, in which a respondent answers each question with one of a series of responses. A typical response scale consists of the following: strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree and neutral/no opinion. A researcher could code these responses by assigning a value of 4 to strongly agree, 3 to agree, 2 for disagree, 1 for strongly disagree and zero for neutral or no opinion.
An easy and convenient way to display survey results in a single table is to construct a frequency distribution table. A typical approach to such a table is for each question in the survey to represent a row. The columns, meanwhile, would consist of the number and percentage of respondents who indicated agreement or disagreement, depending on the number of response categories.
Another approach to summarizing survey results is to use a measure of central tendency, a statistic that reveals the center of a set of data. Measures of central tendency include the mean (arithmetic average), the median and the mode. A common mistake among novice researchers, however, is to take numerically coded survey responses and compute a mean value of the responses to each question. This is not a desirable approach to Likert scale data. Adding a “strongly agree” value of 4 to three “disagrees,” valued at 2 each, and dividing by 4 gives us a mean value of 2.5 with no real indication of its significance. Instead, construct a table in which each question comprises a row, and in the columns, the mode, or the most frequent response, of each question. For example, if 50 people answered a survey, and 33 of them responded “agree” (coded 3 in our example) to a single question, then the value of the mode for that question is 3, which tells us that the largest number of respondents agreed with that question.
Statistical tables can be easily created using a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, or using the table and chart wizard in Microsoft Word.