Necessary property of a frequency table

A frequency table distributes each of a collection of 'individuals' into one of several categories. Each individual must therefore contribute 1 to exactly one of the counts in the table.

Make sure that you can recognise whether a table of counts or percentages is a frequency table.


UN survey responses

The United Nations conducted a survey about the extent to which countries implemented a set of 'Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics' in their National Statistics Offices. The table below was published in a UN report and describes which countries were sent questionnaires (the recipients) and which ones returned the questionnaires (respondents).

It is particularly important to recognise frequency tables because the graphical methods that will be described in the next section are inappropriate for most other types of data.


Finally, note that the values in the bottom right of the table below do not form a frequency table either.

When there are only 2 categories, a single value (such as the response rate of 81% here) adequately summarises the frequency table, so the column of response rates in the published table is a concise summary.