contingency table

(NL: kruistabel)

A contingency table (also: crosstab) is a table that summarizes the frequencies of the combination of the values of two qualitative variables.

The convention is to put the values of the independent variable in the columns and the values of the dependent variable in the rows.

A contingency table can be completed with the sum of each row or column. These are called marginals or marginal totals.

Example

	Female	Male
Strongly disagree	0	4
Disagree	17	45
Neutral	23	91
Agree	12	53
Strongly agree	0	5

• The values of the independent variable Gender are in the columns: Female and Male.
• The values of the dependent variable Survey are in the rows: Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree and Strongly agree.
• The numbers in the cells are the observed frequencies of the combinations of the values of the two variables.

With added marginals:

	Female	Male	Total
Strongly disagree	0	4	4
Disagree	17	45	62
Neutral	23	91	114
Agree	12	53	65
Strongly agree	0	5	5
Total	52	198	250

• The total number of observations \(n = 250\).