Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

5.3 Adding Variable Labels & Value Labels

One helpful feature of SPSS that reduces confusion and information overload allows the user to provide more desciptive names (labels) for the variables in the file. Recall that SPSS has some restrictive rules for naming variables, which is why we have chosen such short abbreviations for our variable names.

But it can be hard (especially at first) to remember that, for example, the variable masc refers to the employee's level of masculinity. Further, it can be hard to remember that a value of 1 on masc means low-masculinity and a score of 2 means high masculinity. SPSS allows us to avoid this problem by adding variable and value labels to our data file.

• 5.3a Adding Variable Labels to the Data File

We have already added variable labels to the major variables in the ezdata.sav file that you downloaded. Click the Variable View tab of the Data Editor to see these labels (Figure 5.15).

To provide these descriptive variable labels, we simply clicked on the appropriate cell of the Label column and typed in the label we wanted to provide for a given variable. For example, we typed Masculinity Level as a more descriptive label for the masc variable. These labels will appear on output files in place of the shorter variable name. This will make interpreting the output files much easier when we conduct data analyses. Next we turn to the process of adding value labels to the categorical variables in our data file.