In this video we'll take a look at how to enter questionnaire or survey data
into SPSS and this is something that a lot of people have questions with so
it's important to make sure when you're working with SPSS in particular when
you're entering data from a survey that you know how to do. Let's go ahead and
take a few moments to look at that.
And here you see on the right-hand side of your screen I have a questionnaire, a
very short sample questionnaire that I want to enter into SPSS so we're going
to create a data file and in this questionnaire here I've made a few
modifications.
I've underlined some variable names here and I'll talk about that more in a
minute
and I also put numbers in parentheses to the right of these different names and
I'll also explain that as well.
Now normally when someone sees this survey we wouldn't have gender
underlined for example
nor would we have these numbers to the right of male and female.
So that's just for us, to help better understand how to enter these data.
So let's go ahead and get started here. In SPSS the first thing we need to do is
every time we have a possible answer such as male or female
we need to create a variable in SPSS
that will hold those different answers. So our first variable needs to be gender
and that's why that's underlined there just to assist us as we're doing this. So
we want to make sure we're in the Variable View tab and then in the first
row here under Name
we want to type gender and then press ENTER and that creates the variable
gender.
Now notice here I have two options: male and female.
So when people respond or circle or check here that they're male,
I need to enter into SPSS some number to indicate that.
So we always want to enter numbers whenever possible into SPSS because SPSS
for the vast majority of analyses performs statistical analyses on numbers
not on words.
So I wouldn't want and enter male, female, and so forth.
I want to enter one's, two's and so on.
So notice here I just arbitrarily decided males get a 1 and females get a
2.
It could have been the other way around but since male was the first name listed
I went and gave that 1 and then for females I gave a 2.
So what we want to do in our data file here is go head and go to Values, this
column, click on the None cell, notice these three dots appear they're called
an ellipsis, click on that and then our first value
notice here 1 is male so Value of 1 and then type Label Male and then click
Add. And then our second value of 2 is for females so go ahead and enter 2
for Value and then
Female, click Add and then we're done with that you want to see both of them
down here and that looks good
so click OK. Now those labels are in here and I'll show you how that works
when we enter some numbers in a minute.
OK next we have ethnicity so I'm going to call this variable ethnicity.
So go ahead and type that in press ENTER and then we're going to the same thing
we're going to create value labels here
so 1 is African-American, 2 is Asian-American, and so on.
And I'll just do that very quickly so going to Values column, click on the ellipsis.
For 1 we have African American, for 2 Asian American, 3 is Caucasian, and
just so you can see that here
3 is Caucasian, 4 is Hispanic, and other is 5, so let's go ahead and
finish that. Four is Hispanic, 5 is Other, so let's go to do that
5 is other. OK and that's it for that variable.
Now we do have it says please state I'll talk about that next that's important
when they can enter text we have to handle that differently.