SPSS exercise 1.1
Open the Television.sav database and click on the Data View tab. You should now be able to see the following:
a. What are the units of analysis in this research project?
When we work in SPSS, we use standard SPSS terminology. For your answers to the following questions, always choose one of the following terms: value label, value, variable(s), variable name, label, and unit of analysis.
b. How do we refer to the 0 in the cell, top left?
c. The columns contain 'age' and 'gender', among other things. What do we call these terms?
d. Rows 1 to 40 contain information about the...
e. The 0 in row 4 shows that the respondent is male. Is 'male' a value, a value label, a variable name, or a label?
f. What do we call the 23 in the second column of row 9?
g. What is the gender, age, and favourite television programme of respondent 4?
h. How many values can the variable 'television' have?
i. What is the label of the variable 'television'?
Hints
1 What are variables?
A variable is a characteristic of a unit of analysis. Examples of variables in a study in which students are the unit of analysis could be gender, prior education, or choice of study programme.
2 What are units of analysis?
The things we gather data about are referred to as units of analysis. Units of analysis are not necessarily people. You can make statements on the length of front-page newspaper articles based on a study. In that case, the front-page articles are the units of analysis - the things that you are making a statement about.
3 What are values?
Values: Every variable can have a certain value. The variable gender can, for example, have the value 'male' or 'female', and be assigned the code 'm' or 'f' or two different numbers, such as '1' and '2'.
Value labels: Using the Value Labels command, you can attach an explanatory note, or 'label', to a variable's values or codes. In the example of gender, it could be indicated that 'm' means 'male' and 'f' means female. The data matrix automatically shows the value labels (instead of the values or codes entered) whenever you click the button with the label.
4 What are labels?
SPSS refers to the description of the name of a variable as a variable label. You can enter this description in the Label column in the Variable View tab.
5 Names of variables
Every variable in SPSS has a unique name. The name must start with a letter and may not include any spaces. Variable names in SPSS are usually abbreviations of the full name of the variable. You can also put the full name in the variable label.
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