but for now we have our five possible options coded in here
so that's perfect so click OK.
Now next say someone checks this box here
Other they get a 5 for ethnicity but then they state something like biracial
so whenever we have a box or an entry that people can type something in that
needs its own variable. So here in row 3 we're going to enter Other_ethnicity.
OK and then we don't want it to be numeric that means it's going to be a
number and it's not it's going to be text here so go ahead and click on
numeric
click on the three dots and then select string. And string indicates that you can
have text and then let's change our characters to 25,
that will allow 25 spaces and then we're done there so string is
entered.
OK our next is age and then notice for age they're going to enter their age and
we asked for it in years
so they'll enter 22, 43 or what have you.
So we don't actually have to make codes like 1 for male, 2 for female, and so on
that value is going to be entered directly
So here all we have to do is create the variable age and then press Enter and then
next we have five questions from what's called the Satisfaction with Life Scale
and here people read the statements and it says below are five statements
you may agree or disagree with using a 1 to 7 scale where SD is strongly disagree
and SA is strongly agree answer each of the following as they apply to yourself.
So the first statement on the scale is "In most ways my life is close to my ideal"
and then a person will circle one of these values indicating whether they
tend to agree with the statement or tend to disagree with it if someone very much
agreed with the statement then they would circle 7 saying they strongly agree.
If they agreed somewhat they probably circle 5 or maybe a 6 and so on.
Now notice we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
questions on this scale and this is a real scale by Diener et al., Satisfaction with
Life Scale it's very popular scale and what I'm going to do in SPSS is notice a
person will answer one of these seven choices here they'll give one of these
answers circle 4 or 6 or what have you.
So anytime someone answers a value it needs to have a variable. So I need to
create a variable in SPSS for this question or statement a variable for
this statement and so on and I'm going to call it the Satisfaction with Life
Scale or SWLS for short, SWLS1 for the first question on it
this will be SWLS2 and so on.
So let's go and create those, so I have SWLS1 and I'll just press ENTER.
SLWS2, these don't have to be in caps but I'm just doing that
SWLS4 and then SWLS5. Now we could go ahead for our own notes and code
what these values mean if we want to. One is Strongly Disagree,
7 is Strongly Agree and so on.
Now I'm going to do that I'll just go the extremes.
So here a value of 1 is Strongly Agree let's make sure that's right.
Nope the value of 1 is Strongly Disagree it's important to double check
that to make sure we get it right and then a value of 7 is Strongly Agree
as is shown here so let's make sure that checks out
1 is Strongly Disagree, 7 is Strongly Agree
so that looks good click OK and then something that's nice here I can just copy
this and then select these and select paste and it will paste all of those value
labels to the remaining questions so that saves us a lot of time and that's
only something we want to do when the variables share the same structure in
other words SWLS has 1 is Strongly Disagree 7 is Strongly Agree
well so does the rest of these so we could go ahead and copy those.
OK so that looks good we can go to the Data View tab now
and here are our variables
gender, ethnicity, the other ethnicity that once again as if someone has an
answer like biracial, age and then the five items on the Satisfaction with Life
Scale. So let's go ahead and take an example and enter some data