excel multiple response data in spss reporter | sam winstanley's blog

24/03/12 03:38Excel Multiple Response Data in SPSS Reporter | Sam Winstanley's Blog

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Excel Multiple Response Data in SPSS Reporter | SamWinstanley's Blog

Introduction

After my last blog post about using auto-categorization in Desktop Reporter, I wasasked the question:

“How do I analyze multiple response data which is coming from Excel”

Here’s a walkthrough of 1 way that you can handle it.

The Data

I started with data which is actually a profile extraction of the Museum database thatI exported to Microsoft Excel which looks as follows (in Excel):

Serial Biology Expectation Museums_Visited Gender

1 NoGeneral knowledge andeducation National Museum of Science Male

2 No Not answered National Museum of Science Female

3 No Interest/satisfy curiosityMuseum of Design,National ArtGallery Female

Museums_Visited is a multiple response which is comma separated.

Splitting out the categories.

Before we can really work on the data in Reporter we need to make a couple oftweaks to it in excel.

Inside Excel – Select the Museums_Visited Column then click on the “Text toColumns” button:



This starts the conversion Wizard.



The end result of this is a brand new column or 2, actually 5 new columns in my case,there is one column for each response to Museums_Visited and the most responsesanybody made to that question is 5. (This is what SPSS Base users will commonly calla “Category Set”).

Now the data is in this shape we can take the rest to Reporter.

Opening up in Reporter

We open up the Excel file in Reporter and it recognises each column to be Text, Textis not great for doing tabulations! it needs some work…



To make the Text variables usable for tabulations we need to categorize them, and wedo that using the new Categorize feature, as follows:



Note I have unchecked the “Other” option and very importantly Not asked (NULL)is checked FOR the first category only this point is very important for a reason I willmention later, the second variable should be categorized with these options:

Note that for this one the User Missing Category is checked.



And repeat this for all of the 5 new variables until we have along with the other cate-gorical variables in the data until we have (note that there are new variables andthese have new icons):

The final step is to make a new variable that combinesour Museums_1-5 into a multiple response.

Hit the select button which opens the Expressionbuilder… We want our new variable to add togetherall the individual responses to the Museums_1-6 vari-ables to make one new multiple response variable.

Click okay, Desktop Reporter does some work in the background and this screen



now has responses in it.

Click Save and close to save this new variable into the data.

Then Export the data to a new format as follows:



Then open the newly exported data.



Note here that I am opening an MDD file after exporting a DDF file.



Drum roll Please

There we have excel multi-response data tabulated in Desktop Reporter.

Some final notes

1. Why did you set up the first Museum variable to use NULL and the others tonot use Null. I knew I was going to make the multiple response variable which had the ex-pression Museums_1+Museums_2+Museums_3 etc.. I also knew that Muse-ums_1 was the real base of the variable, (e.g. people with a blank to Museums_1actually did not answer that question). The Dimensions DataModel has specialways of dealing with the NULL value (this is called the ANSI SQL 92 way tohandle nulls). As a result 1+NULL=NULL…. In our case if Museums_1 had avalue and Musuems_5 did not then the end result of Museums_1+….+Muse-ums_5 would always be null which is definitely not what was expected.

2. Why so many steps.. it must be possible to make it simpler.All of these steps can be automated if you are comfortable with mrStudio andparticularly with TOM scripting. In the end Excel isn’t a great data format, espe-cially when you talk about multiple response data and I think Reporter is doinga good job of getting around some of those weaknesses. This is a slightly special-



a good job of getting around some of those weaknesses. This is a slightly special-ized case because in the end if the data you have in excel is really simple likethis you can achieve a good result just using excel itself.

3. Why the export to DDF, why not just analyse in the Excel format. There’s definitely a performance reason why it’s a good idea, but I also did findsome problems with making tables before I did the export. I suspect there wereways to workaround these but I’d already decided I was going to export thedata to something that could natively hold multiple response data.

excel multiple response data in spss reporter | sam winstanley's blog

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