Define Variables
Creating A Data File in
the SPSS editor.
At the bottom of the screen the following appears:
Click on "Variable
View" and the screen on the following page appears:
You should click on
"string" and the "Variable Type" box will change slightly
to the following:
Notice that the
"Characters" selection box now has the value of 8 in it (the
default). This should usually be set to 25 or 30 depending how long the names
of your subjects might be. The longest name in our data set above is Sleeping
Beauty with 14 characters. We will set our length to 25 in the following
manner.
Click in the
"Characters" box and type 25 as shown below.
Click OK and the
Variable View window appears again with the first variable "Name"
completed as shown.
Defining the Remaining
Variables
Defining each of the
remaining variables (numeric) will follow the same format.
Once all of the
variables are defined you may enter the data. In the lower left hand corner
click on Data View and the following screen will appear.
The frame around the cell indicates where the data is to be entered. In the
figure above, typing "Mickey Mouse" will cause the name Mickey Mouse
to be entered into the first cell. Pressing the key will result in the frame
moving to the right by one cell so that it would be group column. An key will result in the frame moving down to row number 2
and still be in the "name" column. (For more information on entering
data refer to Chapter 3 of the SPSS For Windows Base
System User's Guide Release 6.0.) Part of the example data will appear as the
following:
Notice that the column
headings have changed. These headings are characteristics of variables that you
may now use to define your variables. Type "name" in the name
column-it will identify the first column in your data base as the place to
enter the name of the person from the data. The computer then fills in the
remainder of that row with "default" information. Notice is the
graphic below that it filled in the second column with "numeric".
However, in this case we do not want the variable "name" to be
numeric since names usually have characters rather than numbers. Consequently,
you should click on numeric and the "Variable Type" box will open as
shown in the graphic.