IBM SPSS Essentials, 2nd Edition

13Manipulating Your Data

Chapter Menu

• Chapter Learning Objectives
• Creating Scale Scores
• How SPSS Thinks About Data
• The Importance of Selecting All
• Summary

Chapter Learning Objectives

1. Creatingvariables
2. Recoding variables
3. Using pull‐down menu function with syntax
4. Running syntax file using Ctrl+A

Creating Scale Scores

Typically, you will want to work not only with the raw, unaltered data, but also with aggregated information – commonly in the form of an average or sum of responses across variables. In psychology, we have traditionally referred to such a summary score as a scale score. For example, psychological constructs (such as the personality trait of extraversion) are abstract entities. A common technique of psychological measurement is to consider that extraversion drives responses to many different individual inquiries. Personality assessments, therefore, typically ask many extraversion‐related questions, even though psychologists are mostly interested in your general standing on the extraversion–introversion continuum.

If you look at the assessment in Appendix A, for example, there are 100 items, but these measure only five different factors of immediate interest to the researcher – extraversion is one of the five. The extraversion scale is an aggregate of responses across 20 individual items.

So, if the researcher is interested in an aggregate or summary ...