&textDisplay0=One of the ongoing controversies in the world of modern music is the alarming number of premature deaths that occur - often in tragic or spectacular circumstances. What we're going to show you at first in this exercise is how, by analysing some data about these deaths, we can perhaps understand more about the causes and nature of these deaths.
To do that we've prepared a dataset and you can see it on the screen here. We've taken successful musicians or bands that have experienced a premature mortality (we’ve defined “successful” as having sold at least a hundred thousand records).  We've split the bands or musicians up in two ways. First of all we’ve divided them into two genres -  rock or rhythm and blues (we've left out other types of music for the moment). Secondly we've taken the cause of death and we've classified those into five categories - accidents, alcohol or drugs, suicide, murdered and then finally all medical causes of death.

&textDisplay1=You can see how we've represented the data here and this will be very familiar to anyone who's used spreadsheets, such as Excel, before. We've got three columns here showing the name of the band or the musician, musical genre and the cause of death and each one of the rows represents the data for a particular band or musician.

&textDisplay2=What we're going to do now is take that data in the spreadsheet and put it into a table, a two by five table. We can do this in this case because both of the variables we've got, that's the genre and cause of death, are simply ways of categorising the bands. In other words they're not true measurements such as in height in metres or income in dollars, but they are just categories, what we call categorical or nominal variables.

&textDisplay3=You'll see as the bands are taken from each row of the spreadsheet and dropped down into the table all we're doing is taking the very same data but representing it in a different way. But by putting the data into a table like this allows us to analyse it and start to look at the relationship between these variables. In other words, do musicians involved in different types of music die in different ways? And if so, is that going to allow us to understand what's going on here?