SPSS

“Introduction”

Dr. Mohammad Alzahrani, PharmD, PhD

 Objectives
• By the end of this session, the student should be
able to:
• Be familiar with SPSS interface.
• Recognize data view and variable view.
• Enter data.
Variable View
Data View
• In this Data View, column corresponds to
a variable while each row corresponds to
a case (most commonly an individual).
• In this Variable View, you can adjust the
properties of each of your variables
under 10 categories: Name, Type, Width,
Decimals, Label, Values, Missing,
Columns, Align and Measure.
 To change the name of a column (variable) in
the Data View sheet, click in the appropriate cell and
type in the new name. The names in this column must
not start with a number. They also cannot contain
special characters such as / * $, space etc. You will be
given an error message if your name is in illegal format.

To define the type of data contained

in the column (e.g., characters, strings, numbers, etc.),
click on the appropriate row in the Type column.
 To alter the number of characters displayed
in the column by clicking in the appropriate Width
cell.

To alter the number of digits after the

decimal place by clicking in the appropriate Width
cell.

Click on the appropriate cell in the

Labels column to give a long description, which will
help you to understand the variable you are referring
to
 You can give a text label for category codes by
clicking on the appropriate cell in the column values. Default
is none…… (implement)

To define different type of missing value code,

click on the appropriate cell in the Missing column.
The width of column in the data view sheet can
be altered by clicking in the appropriate Column cell

To align the text or numbers in Data View, click in

the appropriate Align cell.
 To label the scale of data, click in the
appropriate Measure cell. In our example, we need to select
the "Nominal" value
You can now see the results of your labelling by
clicking the     button in the Data Editor View, as
shown below: