A simple and systematic way of displaying both categorical and numerical data is a frequency table. A frequency table is a two column listing of variables and the frequency of the occurrence of the variables it takes in a particular data set.

Numerical Example

For example, the number of cars in a neighbourhood of 10 households are recorded as follows.

You can represent this data using a frequency table as shown below:

You’ll notice that the number of cars acts as a variable in the left column and the number of times it comes up in the list is the frequency for that particular number of cars.

Categorical Example

If we were interested in the number of male and females in a classroom. You can represent this also as a frequency table. A classroom with the 14 males and 10 females are represented in the frequency table below:

Now instead of a number representing a variable it is a category with a frequency value attached to it.

The benefits of a frequency table

A frequency table orders the data where appropriate in a data and displays the data in an easy to see compact form. It also shows how the data values are distributed.