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To create a pie chart in SPSS, first enter the relevant data and labels into the Data View window. Then, select the data in the Data View window and click on the ‘Charts’ tab in the toolbar. Select ‘Pie’ from the list of graph types and select your desired chart options. Click ‘OK’ to generate the pie chart. The chart will then appear in the Output View window.
A pie chart is a circular chart that uses “pie slices” to display the relative sizes of data.
This tutorial explains how to create and interpret pie charts in SPSS.
Example: Pie Chart in SPSS
Suppose we have the following dataset that shows the state of residence for 15 different people:
We can create a pie chart to visualize the frequencies of people from different states by clicking on the Analyze tab, then Descriptive Statistics, then Frequencies:
The following window will pop up:
Drag state over to the box labeled Variable(s), then click on Charts and make sure that Pie charts is selected:
Click Continue, then press OK. The following pie chart will automatically appear:
From the chart we can see that 5 people are from Indiana (blue), 3 are from Kentucky (red), and 7 are from Ohio (green). The table above the pie chart also shows these numbers in percentage forms:
- 33.3% of people are from Indiana
- 20.0% of people are from Kentucky
- 46.7% of people are from Ohio
The pie chart helps us easily see that nearly half of the people in the dataset are from Ohio, as nearly half of the entire chart is green.