Exploration & description/Purposes for keeping cattle

Next, we look at the purposes for which the homesteads kept cattle (Question 3 in CS11Quest2). After opening CS11Data2a a bar chart can be produced in GenStat in a similar way to that for the ranking of sources of income. The bar chart shows the relative frequencies (as a percentage of the responding homesteads) with which each of the purposes of keeping cattle were ranked as: primary, secondary, tertiary, or alternatively ticked as an additional purpose.

Combining by eye the ranks for primary and secondary purposes we see that the major reasons for keeping cattle are for work/draft and cash from sales. Manure and milk were also rated important, followed by meat, investment and dowry.

A striking feature of the bar chart is the number of times that traits were ticked but not ranked among the top three. This indicates the multiple reasons why cattle are important to the homestead. In the final data analysis it will be useful to be able to capture and summarise this information further.