Cross tabulation is the process of creating a contingency table from the multivariate frequency distribution of statistical variables. Heavily used in survey research, cross tabulations (or crosstabs for short) can be produced by a range of statistical packages, including some that are specialised for the task. Survey weights often need to be incorporated. Unweighted tables can be easily produced by some spreadsheets and other business intelligence tools, where they are commonly known as pivot tables.
Definition: A matrix display of the categories of two nominal scaled variables, containing frequency counts of number of subjects in each bivariate category is called a contingency table. The following table lists the gender and the handedness for a sample population of 12 individuals:
| Sample # | Gender | Handedness |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Female | Right-handed |
| 2 | Male | Left-handed |
| 3 | Male | Right-handed |
| 4 | Female | Right-handed |
| 5 | Female | Right-handed |
| 6 | Male | Right-handed |
| 7 | Male | Left-handed |
| 8 | Male | Right-handed |
| 9 | Female | Right-handed |
| 10 | Female | Left-handed |
| 11 | Male | Right-handed |
| 12 | Female | Right-handed |
Cross-tabulation leads to the following contingency table:
| Left-handed | Right-handed | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Males | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| Females | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| Total | 3 | 9 | 12 |