In this tutorial we'll look at how to create value labels in SPSS. And notice
in this data set we have two variables, play golf and satisfaction. Now under
play golf, a 1 means that the person plays golf, so 1 is yes, they play golf,
where 2 is no, they do not play golf. And satisfaction indicates their level of
satisfaction in the community they live in, in which there is a golf course,
where the higher score is greater satisfaction. But for this tutorial we're
going to focus on this variable here, just creating what are called Value
Labels, once again. We're going to code into SPSS 1 is yes, they play golf, and
2 is no, they do not play golf. So to do that we go to the Variable View tab and
under play golf, this row, go to the column, Values, click on this None cell.
When that happens you see this little button here with with the three dots,
that's called an ellipsis. Go ahead and click on that. When we do that the Value
Labels dialog box opens up. Now here we want to start with our first value of
1. So under Value, type a 1, and then move to Label and click on that box, and
then type
Yes, because 1 means yes, they golf. And then click Add. And when you do you'll
see 1 = "Yes" appears down here.
Next we need to code 2 which means, no they do not play golf. So type no under
Label. Now a very common mistake right here is for a person to click OK.
But we don't want to do that until we click Add and we see the 2 = "No"
down below in this box. So just as a reminder, make sure you see
your actual codes, or labels, down here
before you click OK. Since they're down there, let's go ahead and click OK.
And then we can see here, something's changed, 1, yes, you can't see the rest of
it, but it would say 2, No. If we clicked on it we would see it all, but
it shows just one yes by default, but both labels are entered there. So let's
go ahead click on Data View. And then there's one thing we can do
here to begin with.
Notice we have our 1s and 2s here for play golf.
If you want to, this is optional, you can click on this button right here which
notice the tooltip says Value Labels when I hold the pointer over it,
click on that, and notice yes and no come up here. Now this is just for
our convenience, SPSS keeps the numbers 1 and 2 behind the scenes, and that
is what will be analyzed.
Now I typically run my analyses with this option off. I like to look at my
data in numeric form, but if you want to have it on that's fine, just click on
value labels and you'll see these here. OK but I'm going to keep it with
my 1s and 2s. But I do want to show you one of the benefits of coding your
variables, when appropriate, with value labels. Let's do a
quick analysis to look at that. You go to Analyze, Descriptive Statistics,
Frequencies.
Let's go ahead and move our play golf variable over and then click OK. And we
get our viewer window open and here we see, notice in our output
here, play golf, instead of 1 and 2, now we see the labels
yes and no. And that's helpful, because if I had the values 1 and 2 here, I might
say to myself, okay there are five people who were 1 and two people who were 2,
and then I have to try and remember, wait what was a 1 now? Was 1, they
played golf,
or was 1 they didn't play golf? But by creating my value labels I know for
the play golf variable five people answered yes, they play golf, and two
people answered no, they do not play golf. This concludes the tutorial on creating
value labels in SPSS.