Subset Correspondence Analysis

Abstract

This study shows how correspondence analysis may be applied to a subset of response categories from a questionnaire survey (e.g., the subset of undecided responses or the subset of responses for a particular category across several questions). The idea is to maintain the original relative frequencies of the categories and not reexpress them relative to totals within the subset, as would normally be done in a regular correspondence analysis of the subset. Furthermore, the masses and chi-square distances assigned to the subset of categories are the same as those in the correspondence analysis of the whole data set, which leads to a decomposition of total variance into parts if the whole data set is subdivided into disjoint subsets. This variant of the method, called subset correspondence analysis, is illustrated on data from the International Social Survey Programme’s Family and Changing Gender Roles survey.