Introduction to SPSS

When you’re working with data in SPSS (or any software for that matter), ideally you should keep your work organised.  How you organise your work is up to you, but here are some general tips that may help make your life easier:

1. Keep all the files relating to a single ‘project’ in the one place.  A ‘project could be an analysis for a chapter of your thesis or for a publication, primary data collection, data management processes, etc.
2. Make sure you work is backed up.  Either save it somewhere that is automatically backed up, or back it up yourself, regularly.
3. Never edit your original data file.  You should always keep a copy of your original data, and keep it somewhere that you won’t accidentally edit or overwrite it.  You may want to keep it in a sub-folder, for instance.  Sometimes we make mistakes in managing and using data, and need to go back to the original file.  Storing your original data can also be an important ethical consideration.
4. Label your files well, with descriptive file names. 
   • You may like to number them in the order that they occur in the project by placing a number at the front of the filename (a good way to do this is to number using tenfolds (10, 20, 30 …) so that you can insert files later if needed.  For example, you could prefix a file with 15 if you wanted it to be run between file 10 and 20.
   • Use descriptive file names so that you have a good idea what’s in there when you want to find something a year or two (or five) down the track.

Task: Organise your SPSS files

If you have never been so organised with your data sets, now is an excellent time to start!  There’s really not a whole lot worse than doing a bunch of analyses using multiple datasets and having the files all jumbled in with other documents … or worse, spread all over the place in separate folders!

1. Select a location on your computer, removable disk drive, or a cloud location to organise your files for this workshop.
2. Use some of the tips above to label your files well, and save original data in a sub-folder (you can take copies of the original data files and save them in the main folder location). 

Your folder might now look something like this:

Note: the “original data” folder has a copy of all datasets (in SPSS and Excel) shown in this main folder directory.