the highest values first and move on down. So a 5 corresponds to strongly agree so we'll
go ahead and enter that. A 4 is for agree, a 3 was neither agree nor disagree. A 2 was
disagree. And, finally, a 1 was strongly disagree. And I click Add. Now I did that fairly quickly
because this is our second video on creating value labels. So, if you'd like to you might
want to take a look at the first video if you haven't yet for an introduction to this
process that's a little bit slower. So, let's go ahead and click OK. They're all here just
to review very quickly, 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree,
4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree. So click OK. Now let's go back to our Data View tab. And
here I can see the value labels are on. Here are my value labels and I could stretch this
if I want to - notice the double-arrow there - if I go to the right I can see these values
now very easily. So they've all been coded. Now I want to go back to the Variable View
tab and then I'm going to show you a quick method for applying the labels. It really
would be time consuming if I had to enter the value labels for each and every variable.
So it would be nice to know a shortcut method for doing that. So let's go ahead and go to
the Variable View tab, and then here we're going to select this cell - if it's not already.
So we're at item 1 - we're selecting this cell - right click, the shortcut menu opens, select
Copy, so we just copied those value labels. And then click and drag over the remaining
items. Right-click, select Paste, and there you go - they're all in there. Let's take
a look to make sure. Go to our Data View tab and notice that the labels are all in place
here - they're all there. So that was a very quick method for copying the labels, and I'm
going to turn these off; I'm going click on this Value Labels button and turn it off,
because I typically like to see the numbers presented in the cell. But now I have that
coded in my data file and if I conduct any analyses those value labels will be output
in the results instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, when I'm doing analyses like a frequencies table
or what have you. Now often what will happen is people will want to add up these items
to create a total score - you can do that right here. Where this variable would be item
total and it would consist of literally these values added together. So this would be 9,
13, and 10 is 23, this next cell would be these values added together and so on. If
you're interested in doing that you want to take a look at our video using the compute
procedure in SPSS, where it's called adding variables together to create total score.
So you want to take a look at that if you're interested in that. But this video was to
focus on a quick and easy method for copying (focusing on a Likert scale) value labels from one variable to one or more
other variables. Now you should keep in mind the only time
this is relevant is when the variables have the exact same categories. So I wouldn't want
to copy a 1 to 5 Likert scale - those values - to a 1 to 9 Likert scale and what have you.
So you want to make sure the scales are exactly the same in terms of the response options.
And if they are then you can do it and it's a very nice and easy and quick method.