Statistics for Management and the Social Sciences II

Creating a SAS data set and producing a confidence interval

Step 0) Open SAS

Step 1) Load the data using import wizard

Click File/Import data to open the import wizard.
Specify the type of data you're importing. The basketball data is a comma separated variable created in Excel. Therefore we select the .csv option. Click "next".
"Browse" to find the data file "Bballdata.csv". Use the "options" button to tell SAS whether the file has headers and which character separates the columns (SAS know to use commas here because we selected .csv). Click "next".
Give the data set a name, for example "BBall", in the "Member:" field. Click "next".
The next screen will ask if you want the SAS scripts to be saved. This allows you to avoid going through this point-and-click exercise every time we use the data. For now just click "finish".
Check the log file (view/log) to see if there were any problems. The last line should read "WORK.DVD was successfully created".

Step 2) Compute descriptive statistics

To view the data in spreadsheet form, click solutions/analysis/interactive data analysis. Then find your data set in the work directory. Click on your file and hit "open".
Inspect the data to make sure SAS loaded the data correctly. A quick check is to simply count the number of rows and columns.
To calculate descriptive statistics, follow analyze/distribution. Identify the variable of interest by selecting it from the list of variable in the left column and clicking "Y" and then "OK".
This should produce summary statistics like the mean, median, and standard deviation and also a histogram.

Step 3) Compute a confidence interval for the mean