Summarizing survey results?

[mthorn]

I'm such a newbie, I don't even know if I'm posting this question in the right forum. I scoured the documentation and the web for a solution, and have dissected every file I could get my hands, but to no avail.

I conducted a survey (in meatspace, on paper) and have made a Filemaker file with a record for each respondent. I need to summarize responses to multiple-choice questions, e.g. the number of respondents who chose "B" in a given question, and what percentage of all the responses that represents. This is easy to do if you want to get an average for a numerical value, but how do I do this with non-numerical values?

Here's a real specific example. This was a survey of about 750 Japanese high school students about their comic-book reading practices. One question is "How often do you read comics?" In my Filemaker file, I created a a text field that is a pop-up field with 6 values: "Almost everday," "Several times a week," "Once a week," "Once a month," "Rarely," and "No response." I'd like to create a layout that summarizes the data in all the records. It would be even better if I could create separate summaries by sex, age, et cetera.

Do I do this with a calculation? With a script? Any help would be enormously appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: Matt Thorn ]

[BobWeaver]

Here's a quick way:

Assume your popup field is called "ReadFrequency"

Set up a summary field called SelectionCount defined as the count of ReadFrequency.

Create a list type layout. Double click on the body part tab, and in the dialog that comes up, change it from body to sub-summary based on the ReadFrequency field.

Place the ReadFrequency and SelectionCount fields side by side in the sub-summary part of the layout.

Now, sort by ReadFrequency and then print the report or just go to preview mode to view the results.

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: BobWeaver ]

[mthorn]

It worked! Thank you very much. Bob. Now does anyone have any advice on how I can make it calculate and display each figure as a percentage as a whole? For example, following Bob's advice I got the following output:

"Almost everday" 88

"Several times a week" 226

"Once a week" 91

"Once a month" 51

"Rarely" 56

"No response." 2

I wonder if I can get it to give me:

"Almost everday" 88 (17.1%)

"Several times a week" 226 (44.0%)

"Once a week" 91(17.7%)

"Once a month" 51 (9.9%)

"Rarely" 56(10.9%)

"No response." 2 (0.4%)