Introduction & Practice Data File

When running correlations in SPSS, we get the p-values as well. In some cases, we don't want that: if our data hold an entire population, such p-values are actually nonsensical. For some stupid reason, we can't get correlations without significance levels from the correlations dialog. However, this tutorial shows 2 ways for getting them anyway. We'll use adolescents-clean.sav throughout.

Correlation Table as Recommended by the APA

Option 1: FACTOR

A reasonable option is navigating to Analyze Dimension Reduction Factor as shown below.

Next, we'll move iq through wellb into the variables box and follow the steps outlines in the next screenshot.

Clicking Paste results in the syntax below. It'll create a correlation matrix without significance levels or sample sizes. Note that FACTOR uses listwise deletion of missing values by default but we can easily change this to pairwise deletion. Also, we can shorten the syntax quite a bit in case we need more than one correlation matrix.

Correlation Matrix from FACTOR Syntax

Result

When using pairwise deletion, we no longer see the sample sizes used for each correlation. We may not want those in our table but perhaps we'd like to say something about them in our table title.
More importantly, we've no idea which correlations are statistically significant and which aren't. Our second approach deals nicely with both issues.

Option 2: Adjust Default Correlation Table

The fastest way to create correlations is simply running correlations iq to wellb. However, we sometimes want to have statistically significant correlations flagged. We'll do so by adding just one line.

This results in a standard correlation matrix with all sample sizes and p-values. However, we'll now make everything except the actual correlations invisible.

Adjusting Our Pivot Table Structure

We first right-click our correlation table and navigate to Edit Content In Separate Window as shown below.

Select Pivoting Trays from the Pivot menu.

Drag and drop the Statistics (row) dimension into the LAYER area and close the pivot editor.

Result

Same Results Faster?

If you like the final result, you may wonder if there's a faster way to accomplish it. Well, there is: the Python syntax below makes the adjustment on all pivot tables in your output. So make sure there's only correlation tables in your output before running it. It may crash otherwise.

Well, that's it. Hope you liked this tutorial and my script -I actually run it from my toolbar pretty often.

Thanks for reading!