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Old 12-23-2013, 02:43 PM
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BobBridges BobBridges is offline Windows 7 64bit Office 2010 32bit
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NewPuppy, I apologize for the delay; I was away for a while and didn't realize this conversation was still going on. If you like, we can try to discuss this a bit more. Paul may be right, but while I read your 12-19 04:00 post (and reread, and rereread it) I come to suspect that maybe the problem we're having is in a difference of understanding about the word "compare".

At one point you said you might (for example) need to "compare country vs. age", and went on to name a bunch of examples: "europe vs between 20 and 30...asia vs between 20 and 30...germany vs 20" and so on. Now, in statistical analysis there's a thing called "cross-tabulation", and it sounds to me as though this is what you're talking about. For example, if I have 8000 responses to a survey, I can ask my program to "cross-tabulate" the positive responses to question #21 by age and race, and it'll create a table something like this:
Code:
            18-21 | 22-35 | 36-50 | 51-75 |  Null | Total
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Caucasion |  4.5% |  3.2% |  1.2% |  4.1% |  2.5% | 15.5%
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Black     |  4.0% |  2.6% |  0.8% |  7.9% |  0.8% | 16.1%
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Asian     | 14.5% | 12.6% |  0.0% |  1.0% |  0.5% | 28.5%
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Other     | 12.2% | 11.0% |  8.7% |  4.2% |  0.1% | 36.2%
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Null      |  0.2% |  0.5% |  1.5% |  1.4% |  0.1% |  3.7%
          +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------
Total     | 35.3% | 29.9% | 12.2% | 18.6% |  4.0% |100.0%
Is this the kind of "comparison" you had in mind? If so, then we probably misunderstood you at first—I did, anyway—and Paul may be able to suggest something. Me, for this kind of analysis I'd look at SPSS or SAS or one of the other packages that are designed for this kind of analysis.
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