Cross Tabulation: What Is It And Why Should I Use It In My Survey Research?

Article Summary

• Cross-tab charts and tables are used to understand the relationship between one or more segments in your survey data.
• Cross-tabs are an extremely powerful survey analysis tool since they allow you to quickly segment your data and compare responses across those segments. They can help you identify areas to dig deeper.
• The SurveyMethods Custom Report Builder is a powerful tool that helps you build segments and create cross-tab charts and tables in minutes.

Often referred to as a Cross-Tabs report, a cross tabulation chart or table is a way to understand the relationship between one or more segments in your survey data. Take a look at the following questions:

• Are male and female survey respondents equally satisfied with their customer experience?
• How does job satisfaction compare across different company departments or regions?
• Do people in different age ranges have different price sensitivity?

In a well-designed survey, all of these questions can easily be explored with a cross-tab chart or table. Ultimately with a cross-tab we are trying to determine if different segments respond differently to questions on our survey, and (ideally) understand why.

Let’s look at a simple example to answer the first question above (taken from a customer satisfaction survey for a fictional company called ACME):

Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with ACME products?

Here we can see that while the percent of male respondents who are extremely satisfied or satisfied is roughly equal to the overall percentage, the percent that are extremely dissatisfied or dissatisfied is significantly higher. We can use this information to drill down further in our survey data and try to understand ways we can improve those numbers.

You can get even more granular by creating complex segments or using filters on your data. Say for example we want to look at the same data above but we want to drill down and look only at respondents between 26 and 35 years old. When we filter the data we get this graph:

Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with ACME products? [26 – 35 age bracket]

Despite having limited response data, we can quickly see that 2/3rds of males in this age range responded that they are dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with our products. We can pass this information along to our product and marketing teams to research further and try to improve those numbers.

What are the benefits of Cross Tabulations?

Cross-tabs are an extremely powerful analysis tool since they allow you to quickly segment your data and compare responses across those segments. Often when cross-tabs are displayed visually in a chart, unexpected insights will immediately jump out at you and help guide your additional research. While you may not always immediately know why respondents answered a certain way, you will at least know how the groups responded and you can look for additional patterns in other questions, or filter the open-ended comments to gather additional information.

How do I build a Cross-Tab Chart or Table?

If you’re familiar with Pivot Tables in Excel you’re already familiar with a Cross-Tab Table. Graphing that data, with the x-axis containing the segments you want to analyze and the y-axis containing the question you want to review, is how you create a cross-tab chart.

The SurveyMethods Custom Report Builder makes creating cross-tab charts and tables extremely easy. You can compare responses to two questions on your survey (e.g. the male/female question and the satisfied/dissatisfied question) or you can build segments and compare as many segments as you like. Your segments can even use two or more variables. So for example you can compare males in the 26 – 35 age group with females who reported at least $100,000 in household income and have children.

For a complete demo on the SurveyMethods Custom Report Builder, including how to set up segments and create cross-tab charts, watch our video below:

Note that the Custom Report Builder is only available to subscribers in our Professional Plan. Visit our Pricing Page for a comparison