Table of Contents How to Enter Your Data in SPSS ................................................................................. 2 1.1 Preparing your data to be entered ........................................................................................... 2 1.2 Entering your data from the data view ..................................................................................... 2 The Data View: ............................................................................................................................. 2 1.3 What if I have missing data? ..................................................................................................... 3
Additional Resources.................................................................................................. 4
Created by ASK (2012)
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How to Enter Your Data in SPSS Data is entered from the Data View. BEFORE entering data you MUST first define all variables in the Variable View (How do I do that?). If you have your data in Excel, you can import it into SPSS.
1.1 Preparing your data to be entered SPSS analyses numbers not words, so it is important to code all ordinal variables first, BEFORE entering the data. SPSS will allow you to enter nominal data as string (i.e., text/words), but if you plan to use this data in any analysis then it is good practice to code them anyway. (How do I code categorical data?)
1.2 Entering your data from the data view The Data View: This is where you enter your data for each variable. Your variable names should be across the top of the columns (see Figure 1). Your variable names will not show across the top unless you have defined them in the Variable View. DO NOT enter your variable names in the first row!! Only enter data in the Data View. Each numbered row represents a participant, subject, object, etc… (whatever or whoever you are collected data from or about). E.g., for a questionnaire, each row would represent a participant. So row 1 would contain all responses for participant 1. If you have defined Value Labels for your categorical variables then you can enter either the numerical codes or the words the codes represent. E.g., for the variable gender I can enter the codes 1 and 2 (Figure 1) or I can enter Male and Female (Figure 2). *Note: If you have not defined Value Labels, then you must only enter the data as numerical codes (as shown in Figure 1). You can change your Data View to be numbers or Value Labels using the icon highlighted in Figure 2.
Figure 1. Enter data under the corresponding variable column heading in Data View. Created by ASK (2012)
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Clicking here will change your Data View from numbers to Value Labels and vice versa
Figure 2. Enter data under the corresponding variable column heading in Data View.
1.3 What if I have missing data? You have two options: 1. Leave them as empty cells in the Data View. By default SPSS assumes that all empty data cells are missing data and will not include them in the analysis. 2. Assign missing values a numerical code, enter this code everywhere you have missing data and then define missing values from the Variable View. The second option is good practice, particularly for large data sets, because it helps you keep track of what data is missing. For example, if I coded all missing values and then came across an empty cell I would know that something had gotten deleted on accident and would need to refer to an earlier copy of my data to find what value should be there. If I don’t code missing values and something accidently gets deleted, I won’t know about it. If you decide to use the second option, please see the tutorial “How to code, replace and define missing values”.
Created by ASK (2012)
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Additional Resources In the Getting Started folder under the SPSS resources section, you may be interested in the following: 1. How to enter and define variables 2. How to import data from Excel into SPSS 3. Levels of measurement (nominal, ordinal and scale variables) 4. How to code categorical variables (check this out if you have data from a questionnaire) 5. How to create value labels for categorical variables 6. How to code, replace and define missing values * If you are unsure about which variables are categorical, have a look at the Levels of Measurement guide mentioned above.
Return to: 1.1 Preparing your data to be entered 1.2 Entering your data from the Data View 1.3 What if I have missing data?
Created by ASK (2012)
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