What kind of analysis to use in SPSS for finding out groups/grouping

[pivi]

I am new to SPSS and would appreciate some help with a dilemma I have.

My reseach question is about elderly people and I have to find out underlying groups. The group data comes from a questionnaire. I have thought about cluster analysis, but the thing is that I would like to search perceived health and which things affect on the perceived health, eg. what kind of groups of elderley rank their health as bad. I have some 30 questions I would like to check with the analysis, to see if for example widows have better or worse health than the average. I also have weighs in my data so I need to use complex samples.

Could someone please tell me how can I use an already existing function or analysis should I use?

Thank you in advance!

 

[gianmarco]

Hi,
this issue recall me something I read some time ago. It was an article of Michael Greenacre (if I am not mistaken) where age groups where tabulated against their perceived health status.
Correspondence Analysis was used as exploratory tool to graphically visualize the dependence between rows and columns of the contingency table, in order to see what "correspondence" there was age groups and health status.
You can search for previous thread on CA in this same Forum. You could also try and search for that article just
Googling a little. Should I find the exact reference, I will reply again in this thread.
Please note that i am not familiar with spss and i never used it to perform CA.
I know how to perform it in XLStat, Minitab, Statistica, and R.

Hope this helps
Regards
Gm

 

[gianmarco]

Link to the article I was referring to.

 

[pivi]

Thank you, this article seems really helpful. Correspondence analysis is not familiar to me, but I'll see if it fits to my purposes.