IBM SPSS Essentials, 2nd Edition

6Defining Your Data

Chapter Menu

• Chapter Learning Objectives
• Annotation
• Defining Your Dataset
• Summary

Chapter Learning Objectives

1. Annotating your syntax files (*)
2. Defining your variables
   1. Variable labels
   2. Value labels
3. How to view your data labels

You should now be familiar with the use of syntax files for the: (1) creation of variable‐defined data shells, (2) control over saving data files, and (3) access of data from other sources (for example, Excel). You'll now typically want to take your new data file and provide some additional information – primarily more specific definition to your variables.

Annotation

Remember that you will be working exclusively in the syntax environment: this keeps a diary of your steps in case you need to retrace what you did with your data. When you access SPSS, always open up a syntax file rather than a data file. The “get file” command will open up the data file for you – don't go messing around with opening data directly. Before you get too far with this method, however, you'll want to also get into the very important habit of annotating your diary. Figure 6.1 shows a note to ourselves (on line 1) that the syntax will create a new (empty) data file and that we were working on this project on December 3.

The important elements of a note are at least one asterisk (*) at the beginning and a period (.) indicating the end. We typically ...