Is there any difference? Or they are basically the same? Just Excel users call it 'pivot table' and statistically-minded people call it 'contingency table'?
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6$\begingroup$ As far as I know, "pivot table" is a software device term and contingency table is a statistical term. Any electronic table where you can mouse-drag data categories from columns to rows, from rows to layers or other way, and do other flexible restructuring - is a pivot table. Contingency table is just a crosstabulation (most often, frequency) where cell entries tell about some sort of "affinity" between rows and columns. It can be on paper, not only electronic. $\endgroup$– ttnphnsCommented Dec 1, 2012 at 7:48
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$\begingroup$ For a related question -- about what a pivot table is how they can be useful, see What are pivot tables, and how can they be helpful in analyzing data? $\endgroup$– Glen_bCommented Nov 4, 2015 at 5:49
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$\begingroup$ In principle, a contingency table can have any number of dimensions, one, two, three, and so forth. Clearly even three dimensions can be awkward to handle but that is a practical issue. Often a multidimensional contingency table may just be represented in list form. A complicated contingency table might never be listed as such, but analysed with some model and studied through model output. So it's important to realise that a contingency table is not defined by having rows and columns. I can't comment equivalently on pivot tables and how many dimensions they may have. $\endgroup$– Nick CoxCommented Nov 4, 2015 at 9:17
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You may create a contingency table using a software tool called pivot table :)
A contingency table is a crosstable with rows, columns and data related to each of the row/column combination. You may draw such a table on a piece of paper, you may use an OLAP cube as the source of data etc. As this site says, a contingency table is essentially a display format used to analyse and record the relationship between two or more categorical variables.
A pivot table is one of the possible ways of creating a contingency table. A typical pivot table has the visual form of the contingency table, although a pivot table might have only one column or even zero etc. The pivot operation in spreadsheet software can be used to generate a contingency table from sampling data. However you may use the pivot table as a tool to play with the data in other ways, too.
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1$\begingroup$ Thank you--I had noticed that when you made the change over a year ago (and upvoted your answer then). $\endgroup$– whuber ♦Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:00