Set Up Project Folder and Open Data; SPSS Data File Inspection; SPSS Categorical Variable Inspection; SPSS Metric Variable Inspection; Optionally: Edit Data; Choose and Run Tables/Charts/Tests. 1. Set Up Project Folder and Open Data The biggest waste of time and effort in SPSS is probably not keeping projects organized. A related pitfall is not regularly making backup copies of the entire […]
SPSS transformations between DO IF … and END IF are applied only to cases (rows of data) that satisfy one or more conditions. In many cases, IF is a faster way to accomplish the same results. SPSS Do If Example Say we’d like to convert people’s monthly income into income classes. We may want to use different cut […]
Introduction This tutorial shows how to work proficiently with SPSS datetime variables. You can follow along with it by downloading and opening hospital.sav. SPSS Main Datetime Functions This tutorial will cover the datetime functions outlined in the table below. Most of them apply to SPSS date variables and time variables as well because their values are stored in numbers of […]
Summary By default, SPSS right pads string values with spaces up to the length of their containing string variables. You don’t usually see this but it may complicate concatenating strings. Such complications are avoided by trimming off trailing spaces using RTRIM (right trim). In Unicode mode, RTRIM is applied automatically but it’s fine to use it anyway. Results of steps 6 and 7 of the […]
6. Inconvenient Distributions (Overview and data file are are found here) Let’s first state this clearly: we don’t exclude variables simply because their distributions are not to our liking. What we mean by “inconvenient distributions” are variables that don’t really provide us with useful information. This point is perhaps best explained by an example. Let’s inspect q4. […]
5. Presence of User Missing Values (Overview and data file are are found here) User missing values are values that we want to exclude from analysis. We do so by specifying (ranges of) values as “missing” in SPSS. For ordinal variables, we typically exclude answers such as “Don’t know” or “Not applicable”. For metric variables, we exclude values that are not […]
1. SPSS Case Count and Variable Count (Overview and data file are are found here) The very first thing we want to know about basically any data file, are its dimensions: how many cases and how many variables does it contain? For a quick case count, select any cell in data view and press the CTRL + shortkey. Alternatively, just […]
Introduction Working with SPSS datetime variables is not hard at all if you understand some basics. This tutorial walks you through just those. Those who’d like to follow along may download and open hospital.sav. SPSS Datetime Variables – What Are They? SPSS datetime variables are variables that hold the numbers of seconds between the year 1582 and […]
