SPSS – Combining Data with Syntax and Output

SPSS Syntax, Data and Output The previous tutorials explored SPSS’ three main windows. These are SPSS Data Editor window ; SPSS Syntax Editor window ; SPSS output viewer window . Now that we have a basic understanding of what they’re for, let’s take a look at the big picture: the figure below proposes a typical flowchart for proceeding through a research […]

Restructuring Data in SPSS – Overview

SPSS offers several simple ways for restructuring data. VARSTOCASES -short for “variables to cases”- stacks variables on top of each other. Its reverse is CASESTOVARS -short for “cases to variables”. It basically stacks groups of cases behind each other in new variables. AGGREGATE adds summary statistics such as frequencies, sums and means to your data, optionally collapsing cases in the process. […]

SPSS – Merge Categories of Categorical Variable

Summary Merging some categories of a categorical variable in SPSS is not hard if you do it the right way. This tutorial demonstrates just that. We recommend you try the examples for yourself by downloading and opening hotel_evaluation.sav. Right, when doing a routine inspection of this data file, we’ll see that the variable nation has many small categories. This becomes apparent when […]

SPSS DO REPEAT – Simple Tutorial & Examples

DO REPEAT is a command for running other commands repetitively.SPSS DO REPEAT is often used for looping over (possibly new) variables. VECTOR with LOOP is an alternative way for doing so. Introduction Suppose we have a variable containing values 1 through 4 and we’d like to dichotomize it for a regression analysis. (For some more background, see Creating Dummy Variables in SPSS.) […]

SPSS – Splitting a String Variable

After importing some data into SPSS, some answers ended up in a single string variable. The data are in splitstrings.sav, part of which is shown below. Excel has a nice “text to columns” function to split it but SPSS hasn’t…So you think you can syntax?Then let’s go and split this string into the original answers. Step 1 – New […]

Creating Tables in SPSS

Tables with statistics (means, sums and many more) for metric variables are easily created with DESCRIPTIVES. For reporting such descriptives for groups of cases separately, try MEANS. Frequency distributions and statistics (median, percentiles and more) for categorical variables are generated with FREQUENCIES. Frequencies or percentages for combinations of two or more categorical variables are created with CROSSTABS, which can also run chi-square tests. […]

SPSS CROSSTABS Command

SPSS CROSSTABS produces contingency tables: frequencies for one variable for each value of another variable separately. If assumptions are met, a chi-square test may follow to test whether an association between the variables is statistically significant. This tutorial, however, aims at quickly walking through the main options for CROSSTABS. We’ll use freelancers.sav throughout this tutorial as a test data […]