The first step is to tell the data editor what variables you wish to enter information about.
At the bottom of the Data Editor page, you will see a tab with the words Data View. Next to this you should see another tab Variable View. The Data View that you are currently in allows you to enter data. But before doing so you need to go into Variable View in order to indicate the details of the variables you have.
➢ Click on Variable View.
Now you should see a page very similar to the one in the Data View, but this time the columns are headed Name, Type, Width etc. (see Figure 4.2).
What you are going to do here is to tell the data editor that you have three variables, and provide information about the nature of these variables. The first variable from Table 4.1 is ‘case’ (i.e. the number allocated to each respondent that we wrote on the questionnaire).
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Figure 4.2 The SPSS Variable View page
➢ Position your cursor on the cell in row number 1, under the column labelled
Name.
➢ Left-click on your mouse, type the word ‘case’, and press Returnon your keyboard (Returnis the key which starts a new line). The Variable View should now look like Figure 4.3.
What you have done is to tell SPSS that the first variable is called ‘case’. You don’t have to call this variable ‘case’ – you could call it, say, ‘respnum’, an abbreviation of respon-dent number. However, in all versions of SPSS for Windows up to and including version 11, the maximum number of characters that any variable name can have is eight, and the variable name cannot have any spaces between characters. So, you could not call it either ‘respon-dentnumber’ because this has over eight characters, or ‘resp num’ because an illegal space is used. If you are using SPSS version 12 you are not limited to eight characters here.
You have now told the data editor that you have a variable called ‘case’. You may have noticed that when you pressed Return various information was placed in the other columns.
In the second column, Type, you will see the word Numeric and a grey box with three dots on it. On the Width column you will see the number 8 and so on. You don’t need to place information in all of these columns, so we’ll just deal with the columns you are most likely to use. There is one column, Label, in which it is always a good idea to place information.
Label allows you to give the variable a name that you will always understand. As explained earlier, the maximum number of characters that you can give a variable is eight (unless you are using SPSS version 12), but in Label you can have as many as 256 characters if you want to. This is often helpful because it is easy to forget that an abbreviation like ‘respnum’ refers to respondent number. It is also good practice because SPSS output, on which the results of your analyses are printed, usually shows the variable label rather than the variable name (with its maximum of eight characters).
➢ Type the word ‘Case’ in the top cell of the column Label.
➢ Now enter the second variable, ‘gender’, by clicking on the cell in the second row in the column labelled Name(that is directly under the word ‘case’ that you have already typed in). Here type the word ‘gender’ and press Return.
Figure 4.3 The SPSS Variable View page after the variable ‘case’ has been entered
You have now told the data editor your second variable refers to gender.
➢ Now type ‘Gender’ in the Labelcolumn.
The gender variable is slightly more complicated than the case variable. The reason for this is that gender is a categorical variable with two possible values: male and female. Therefore, you need to tell the data editor that you are dealing with the two categories of male and female. To do this:
➢ Click on the cell in the second row under the column Values. A small grey box with three dots on it should appear.
➢ Click on this small grey box and a dialog box headed Value Labelswill appear.
You are going to use this to tell the data editor that you are going to code males as the number 0, and females as the number 1. The reason for using the codes 0 and 1 rather than just typing in male for a man and female for a woman is that SPSS works far better with data in a numerical form than it does with words.
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Figure 4.4 SPSS Variable View: entering value label information
➢ Click on the white box to the right of Valueand type the number 0.
➢ Click on the white area next to Value Labeland type ‘male’.
➢ Click on the button under these called Add.
You should see that the Value and Value Label boxes are now empty and that in the box underneath the following has appeared: .00⫽‘Male’. This is an instruction to the data editor that for the variable gender, ‘0’ refers to males.
Repeat these three steps, this time entering ‘1’ in Value, and ‘female’ in Value Label, and again clicking on Add. Now in the box you should also see 1.00⫽‘Female’ (see Figure 4.4).
➢ Finally, click on the OKbutton on the dialog box and you will be returned to the main Variable Viewpage.
Well done, you have now told the data editor that you have two variables, number and gender, and that gender is coded 0 for males and 1 for females. You are now ready to enter the final variable, well-being.
➢ Type ‘wellbe’ in the third cell under the column labelled Nameand press
Return.
➢ Type ‘Well-being’ under the Labelcolumn and press Return. The page should now look as shown in Figure 4.5
That’s it! You have now completed the job of telling the data editor that you have three variables, ‘case’, ‘gender’ and ‘wellbe’, that gender is coded 0 for males and 1 for females, and that the labels of these variables are ‘Case’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Well-being’.
Whenever you wish to enter variables into SPSS in future, you can do so using exactly the same steps. You can call the variables anything you like (as long as the name has no more than eight characters, unless you are using SPSS version 12 where this limit on the number of characters is no longer in force), label them whatever you like and code the values of categorical variables in any way you like.
Figure 4.5 The SPSS Variable View after the case, gender and well-being variables have been entered