How to determine percentiles/quantiles in SPSS? I am really new to statistics and now I have some data and I want to make a frequency table with the yearly salary (a variable in my data). In the end, I need to be able to say what is the maximum salary of the first 25% people and the minimum salary of the top 10%.
How should I do it in SPSS?
 A: Since salary is presumably a scale variable with a lot of different values, you might want to suppress the frequency tables (checkbox on the main dialog).  On the Statistics subdialog you can choose percentiles and other statistics.
I don't know what you mean by the maximum salary of the first 25%.  If you are referring to quartiles,  you can get those the same way.  If you mean the first quarter of the cases in your dataset, you would need to use sample selection and then run the frequencies procedure.  On the Data > Select Cases dialog, you can choose "based on time or case range" and select, say, cases 1 - 25 if you have a dataset with 100 cases and then run frequencies.  Be sure to return to that dialog and turn this filter off if you are going to use all the data later in the session.
Another useful procedure is Data > Rank Cases.  If you rank by salary and then sort by rank (Data > Sort Cases),  you can see exactly where each actual salary falls in the distribution.
HTH,
Jon Peck
