Introduction to SPSS

Later on, when you’re running some analyses and you want to look at, say, how many of your respondents are male or female, you’ll run a procedure and the results will be displayed in the Output Viewer window.  If we left our data as they are, we’d get the results we want, but we probably wouldn’t know how to read them.  E.g., if I ran that procedure, here’s the output I’d get:

But which ones are male and which ones are female?!  Because I haven’t labelled my data, it can be difficult to remember what all the values for each variable refer to. 

So here’s a tip: always label your variables and their values (particularly for categorical variables).

  Task: Label variable and values for sex.

The syntax to label variables and values is pretty straightforward.

To give the variable sex a descriptive label, here’s what you could type in your syntax file:

variable labels sex Sex of respondent.

Then, to label the categories of sex (in this case, male and female), we could type the following:

value labels sex 1 ‘Male’ 2 ‘Female’.

After labelling my variable, sex, if I run the same procedure as above I get a table that very clearly indicates what is being presented: