Cross-tabulation

Imagine you have a bunch of toys and you want to figure out which ones are the most popular among your friends. You decide to make a chart where you write down all the types of toys you have along the top and all your friends' names down the side.

Whenever a friend plays with a specific toy, you put a checkmark in the box where their name and the toy intersect.

Once you fill out the whole chart, you can easily see which toys are the most popular among your friends.

This chart you made is called a cross-tabulation! It helps you keep track of how many times different things happen to different groups. In our example, we used it to figure out which toys were most popular with our friends, but people in all sorts of fields (like business, medicine, and government) use cross-tabulations to figure out all kinds of important information.