Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

As you are probably well aware by now, it can be difficult to remember what the various numerical values assigned to levels of our categorical variables (gender, masc, fem, soc and task) mean. The Values feature of SPSS allows us to provide descriptive verbal labels for these numerical values. As with variable labels, value labels will appear in output files. Thus, you will not have to remember that a score of 2 for gender means a female employee - instead of 2, the word Female will be displayed in the output file.

• 5.3b Adding Value Labels to the Data File

This procedure is also accomplished from the Variable View in the Data Editor (Figure 5.16).

The first part of each value label we added for each variable is shown in the Values column of this Data Editor view. As an aside, you may be wondering why there are no value labels shown for other variables in the file (e.g., nach). The reason is that the other variables are continuous (as opposed to categorical). Since these types of variables can take on many different values (e.g., an average achievement need of 6.43), it would be unwieldy (and unhelpful) to attempt to provide a verbal label for every possible numerical value of continuous variables.

To see how we added these value labels, click on the first cell in the Values column (i.e., the value lables for gender). When you do this, a grey box with three dots (...) will appear to the right of the (1.00, Male)... that you see in this cell (Figure 5.17).

Click on the grey box and a Value Labels dialog window appears (Figure 5.18).

Note that since we have already provided the labels, they appear in the lower pane of Figure 5.18. In Figure 5.19 we illustrate how we created the first label (1.00 = "Male").

As can be seen, this simply involved typing 1 in the Value: box and typing Male in the Value Label: box, then clicking the Add button. To create the second value label, we repeated this procedure, typing 2 for value and Female for value label, then clicking the Add button again.

The same procedure was followed to create the value labels for the other four categorical variables (masc, fem, soc and task). You should click on the cells under the Labels column for these other variables to familiarize yourself with the labels we have added for them.

To view a video of the procedures in this section, click Play below.

In Figure 5.20 we show an example of a frequency table we generated that displays the variable label and value labels for gender.

As this figure shows, the variable and value labels are well worth the time to create, since they greatly facilitate the ease of interpreting output of data analyses.