The data editor provides a spreadsheet like method for creating and editing data files. It automatically opens when you start a session. Within the data editor, there are two views data and variable.
Data view displays the actual data values or defined values labels
To switch to the Data View click on the tab at the bottom left.
Variable view displays variable definition, information, including defined variable and value labels, data type (i.e. string, data and numeric), measurement level (nominal, ordinal, or scale), and user‐defined missing values.
To switch to the Variable View click on the tab at the bottom left.
You can enter data directly into the Data Editor in the Data view. You can enter data in any order.
In addition to files saved in SPSS format, you can open the spreadsheet (Excel), Database (Access, dBASE), tab‐delimited files and other types of ASCII text files without converting the files to an intermediate format or enter data definition information.
Compute Variable computes values based on numeric transformations of other variables. For example, Compute Variable can be used to :
For this example, we want to find the hourly wage of each individual. To find this we would divide the income variable by hours variable.
For this example, we want to code a variable to categorize level of education (educ_cat). If the participant has <= 8 years of education then educ_cat = 1 (only elementary), if years of education < 12 years then educ_cat = 2 (some high school) , if years of education = 12 then educ_cat = 3 (high school grad), if years of education > 12 then (college/university).
This is a very well used feature in SPSS. It allows you to temporarily split your data into different groups based on the categories of a particular variable.
The Descriptives procedure is used to find the measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and measures of dispersion (range, standard deviation, variance, minimum and maximum) and measures of kurtosis and skewness. This procedure is best suited to describe continuous variables.
The Frequencies procedure is used to generate statistics and graph summaries for categorical variables.
The Explore procedure is used to examine whether a variable is normally distributed with statistics (Shapiro-Wilk and Kolmogorov-Smirnov) and plots (Q-Q Plot, Stem and Leaf Plot and Box Plot).
A crosstabulation table is also known as a crosstabs or contingency table. It is used to show the relationship between two or more categorical variables.
The Chi-Square is used to test whether the relationship between two cross-tabulated variables is significant. The Chi-square is based on two assumptions.
For the Chi-Square, the null hypothesis that the row variable is unrelated (that is, only randomly related) to the column variable. The alternative hypothesis is not rejected when the variables have an associated relationship
A one sample t-test procedure tests whether the mean of a single variable differs from a specified constant.
We are interested in determining whether the average age of stay at home mothers is the national average of 37 years of age.
The independent samples t-test. It is also referred to as unpaired or unrelated samples t-test.
We are interested if there is a difference between the number of hours the wife worked in households with and without a mortgage.
The paired samples t-test is also referred to as the dependent or related samples t-test. It is useful for testing if a significant difference occurs between the means of two variables that represent the same group at different times (before or after) or related groups (husband or wife).
We are interested in determining whether there is a difference between the age respondents first smoked and the age at which they began smoking cigarettes daily
This procedure compares the means from several samples and tests whether they are all the same or whether one or more of them are significantly different. This is an extension of the t-test for datasets containing more than two samples.
We are interested in determining whether there is a difference between age of
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