Descriptive Statistics – One Categorical Variable

Introduction When reporting on data, we usually summarize our variables. The most basic way for doing so is presenting their frequency distributions. Visualizing these as histograms tends to give immediate insight into what a variable ‘looks like’, especially when many distinct values are present. However, frequency distributions often provide more detail than we actually need. […]

How to Convert String Variables into Numeric Ones?

Converting an SPSS string variable into a numeric one is simple. However, there’s a huge pitfall that few people are aware of: string values that can’t be converted into numbers result in system missing values without SPSS throwing any error or warning. This can mess up your data without you being aware of it. Don’t believe me? I’ll demonstrate the problem -and the solution- […]