 As we continue to look at basic graphics in SPSS, a really common one is histograms. And this is a graphic for data that is quantitative or scaled or measured or interval or ratio level. Those really all are referring to basically the same thing. And in any of them you're going to want to make a histogram to see what the variable is like. Now I'll mention that SPSS prefers the term scale for these variables and that's what shows up in the data definitions. And I like to think of it as the scales of justice. But why are we making a histogram? The point is to see what you have to see what the data is like. And there's a few things in particular that you're going to be looking for. Number one, you're going to be looking for the shape of the distribution. Is it unimodal, bimodal, skewed left, skewed right? Are there gaps in the data that suggests that maybe you have some important mechanism operating? Are there outliers that you would need to take consideration of before you do your analysis? Is your data symmetrical? There are a lot of different things that you could look for and some of these are going to have a lot of influence on your analysis. So it's important to take a look at the data and histogram will give you a great impression of a quantitative or scaled variable. We'll try it in SPSS. Simply open up this syntax file and we'll see how it works. When you're in SPSS, most of this is really just to open up the data set. It's the same one we've used in the others, this demo data set. And here's the code for Mac, adjust the version number if you need to and here's the code for Windows. But once you have the data set open, you can use the commands and it's really, really simple. All you need to do is come up to graphs. We'll go to legacy dialogues and we'll come down here to the bottom to histogram. And we're going to make a basic histogram of age. So I click that and I come to age, it's our first variable and I simply click this to move it over and hit OK. I'll make the output window bigger and there's our histogram. And from this, we can see that our distribution is unimodal. We can see it's pretty close to normal. It's slightly skewed on the high end, but not very much. And this is going to be a really good variable for most of our analysis because at least most of the assumptions of the kinds of procedures that we might want to use. Now, if I want to make things slightly more complicated because you see that the command for this is extremely simple. We can make a small modification. I'll show you here. We can superimpose a normal distribution. And all I have to do for that is come back to graphs to legacy dialogues and to histogram. And I just check this box right here, displaying normal curve. And what that's going to do is it's going to create the same distribution but it's going to put on top of it a line of a bell curve or normal distribution that has the same mean and standard deviation. And here you can see that we're pretty close to normal and this is a nice way of confirming that. And again, the code for it is really simple. All it does is it adds the word normal in this sentence and that gives us everything we need. So one of the reasons I really like the legacy dialogues in SPSS is because it's so concise. It's so simple and it gets you what you need so you can get a grip of your data and move ahead.