Excel Multiple Response Data in SPSS Reporter | Sam Winstanley's Blog

24/03/12 03:38

Excel Multiple Response Data in SPSS Reporter | Sam Winstanley's Blog

Introduction
After my last blog post about using auto-categorization in Desktop Reporter, I was asked the question: How do I analyze multiple response data which is coming from Excel Heres 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 that I exported to Microsoft Excel which looks as follows (in Excel):
Serial Biology Expectation General knowledge and 1 No education 2 No Not answered 3 No Interest/satisfy curiosity Museums_Visited National Museum of Science National Museum of Science Museum of Design,National Art Gallery Gender Male Female 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 of tweaks to it in excel. Inside Excel Select the Museums_Visited Column then click on the Text to Columns button:

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Excel Multiple Response Data in SPSS Reporter | Sam Winstanley's Blog

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This starts the conversion Wizard.

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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 responses anybody made to that question is 5. (This is what SPSS Base users will commonly call a 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, Text is not great for doing tabulations! it needs some work

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

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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 will mention later, the second variable should be categorized with these options:

Note that for this one the User Missing Category is checked.
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And repeat this for all of the 5 new variables until we have along with the other categorical variables in the data until we have (note that there are new variables and these have new icons): The final step is to make a new variable that combines our Museums_1-5 into a multiple response.

Hit the select button which opens the Expression builder We want our new variable to add together all the individual responses to the Museums_1-6 variables to make one new multiple response variable.

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

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Then open the newly exported data.

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

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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 to not use Null. I knew I was going to make the multiple response variable which had the expression Museums_1+Museums_2+Museums_3 etc.. I also knew that Museums_1 was the real base of the variable, (e.g. people with a blank to Museums_1 actually did not answer that question). The Dimensions DataModel has special ways of dealing with the NULL value (this is called the ANSI SQL 92 way to handle nulls). As a result 1+NULL=NULL. In our case if Museums_1 had a value and Musuems_5 did not then the end result of Museums_1+.+Museums_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 and particularly with TOM scripting. In the end Excel isnt a great data format, especially when you talk about multiple response data and I think Reporter is doing a good job of getting around some of those weaknesses. This is a slightly specialhttp://www.surveyxtreme.com/?p=74 Pagina 10 di 11

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a good job of getting around some of those weaknesses. This is a slightly specialized case because in the end if the data you have in excel is really simple like this you can achieve a good result just using excel itself. 3. Why the export to DDF, why not just analyse in the Excel format. Theres definitely a performance reason why its a good idea, but I also did find some problems with making tables before I did the export. I suspect there were ways to workaround these but Id already decided I was going to export the data to something that could natively hold multiple response data.

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