Counting survey votes

[Matt]

Hi everyone,

Constructed a fairly big table with 20 rows, most of which are
TINYINTs based on user selection for a dropdown box. This is the form:

http://www.threechords.org/spb/survey/

Each field obviously corresponds to a row in the table, and the
majority are integers indicating the user's selection.

My issue is how to do meaningful stuff with the stored data. I believe
I need to use GROUP BY functionality but I'm not certain - how can I
calculate, say, the number of "1" ('Excellent') values for the field
"writing_quality"?

Matt

[Gordon Burditt]

>Constructed a fairly big table with 20 rows, most of which are

>TINYINTs based on user selection for a dropdown box. This is the form:

http://www.threechords.org/spb/survey/

Each field obviously corresponds to a row in the table, and the
majority are integers indicating the user's selection.

This doesn't really have that much to do with PHP; it's more related to
SQL and databases in general.

>My issue is how to do meaningful stuff with the stored data. I believe
I need to use GROUP BY functionality but I'm not certain - how can I
calculate, say, the number of "1" ('Excellent') values for the field
"writing_quality"?

select count(*) from survey where writing_quality=1;

If you want the whole distribution of votes:

select writing_quality, count(writing_quality) from survey group by writing_quality;

which will get you a list of writing_quality values and the number
of votes that gave that value, e.g.:

writing_quality count(writing_quality)
1 32
2 86
3 74
4 50
5 22
7 1

(note: it seems nobody voted "6", so it is not listed).

If you want an overall average:

select avg(writing_quality) from survey;

which might give you 2.8 as an average.

You can also try things like:

select avg(writing_quality) from survey where sex = 'Male' and age >= 20 and age < 30;

which gives you a score from a specific segment of your users.

[Matt]

On Jul 1, 7:47 pm, [e-mail] (Gordon Burditt) wrote:

Constructed a fairly big table with 20 rows, most of which are
TINYINTs based on user selection for a dropdown box. This is the form:

http://www.threechords.org/spb/survey/

Each field obviously corresponds to a row in the table, and the
majority are integers indicating the user's selection.

This doesn't really have that much to do with PHP; it's more related to
SQL and databases in general.

My issue is how to do meaningful stuff with the stored data. I believe
I need to use GROUP BY functionality but I'm not certain - how can I
calculate, say, the number of "1" ('Excellent') values for the field
"writing_quality"?

select count(*) from survey where writing_quality=1;

If you want the whole distribution of votes:

select writing_quality, count(writing_quality) from survey group by writing_quality;

which will get you a list of writing_quality values and the number
of votes that gave that value, e.g.:

writing_quality count(writing_quality)
1 32
2 86
3 74
4 50
5 22
7 1

(note: it seems nobody voted "6", so it is not listed).

If you want an overall average:

select avg(writing_quality) from survey;

which might give you 2.8 as an average.

You can also try things like:

select avg(writing_quality) from survey where sex = 'Male' and age >= 20 and age < 30;

which gives you a score from a specific segment of your users.

Thank you very much, I've managed to construct a nice-looking page
(http://www.threechords.org/spb/survey/results.php) - apologies for my
poor group choice here.

Matt