Welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I present you Introduction to XPSS Software for Beginners. And in this part, I will show you how to load data into XPSS and how to define the properties of the variables. My name is Titokan and this is Titokan Mag Solutions, a YouTube channel for improving the knowledge of how to do things. XPSS is a statistical software for data analysis.
and it's an acronym which stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. It was first packaged in 1968, but since IBM had acquired it in 2009, SPSS is no longer an acronym by just a name called IBM SPSS Statistics. However, regardless of the name change, the features and functions remain unchanged.
Now, let's go to the desktop and open the SPSS software by double clicking on the icon. This is the SPSS interface and there are two view windows. There is data view window which usually opens by default and the variable view window. The data view is the window where you enter or load in your data while the variable view is the window where you define the properties of the variables.
Activities in these two view windows are actually what I want to show you in this video. Please endeavor to see or watch this video to the end. This is our table of data in a self-spread sheet saved as length and weight data like this.
This data is however not a true measurement but is created for useful application in this video. Here I have the following variable names. ID which is the identification number of the variable, gender for male and female variables, length of the variable and weight of the variable. The data can be any type of data and must be entered and saved in a set spreadsheet for ease of access. Now let's go into SPSS and get started.
You can enter the data directly by typing in the data one by one and column by column. which can obviously be time consuming especially if you have large data sets. The best option in this regard is to go to the Excel spreadsheet, analyze the data excluding the variable names, right click and copy the data. Then, come to SPSS data view window, right click and select paste to enter the data directly.
Just like that, the Data is entered manually into XPSS with default name generated for each variable. Now, let's turn to the Variable View window to give the actual names to the variables and define their properties. As you can see in the Name column, the default names are VAR1, VAR2, VAR3, and VAR4, while the type of measure or level of measurement are all unknown. This is the situation when you manually entered your data into XPSS workspace directly. What I will do now is give appropriate names to the variables and then define their properties.
But there are few conditions to observe when naming variables. 1. The variable names must not be more than 64 characters. 2. The variable names must not have space between them. Instead, use underscore.
And 6. Use of camel case is allowed. However, in this video, Our data has short variable names, so I will click on each default variable name and change the name as appropriate. The first variable is ID. The second variable is gender.
The third variable is length. And the fourth variable is weight. These variable names are just names for the sake of identity.
They do not appear anywhere in the data analysis process. The next property column is variable type. Since our data contains only numbers, then it is numeric and so I will leave this column as numeric variable type.
If your data contains any other variable type other than numbers, you can click on the cell like this and then click on the blue buttons to open the variable type options. Choose the radio button for the appropriate variable type and then click OK. Repeat this for the remaining variables in this column and you will be done with this column.
The next property column is width. Since our data contains only numeric variables, any change in this column will not have impact on the variable or the data. So I may not have to change anything in this column but If your data contains strange variable type, you can use this column to inform SPSS the number of characters or letters that is allowed in that variable column. The default here is 8 and that means your string or words must not have more than 8 letters or characters. You can increase or reduce the number of characters by clicking on each cell.
and using the up arrow to increase it or using the down arrow to reduce it. The next property column is decimals. The default here is two decimals.
If you go back to the data view window, you will see that the data for each variable is displayed at two decimal places. Now, return to the variable view window. When you click on the cell like this, you can use the up arrow to increase the decimal places like this.
And at the data view, you will see the decimal places have increased. In my case, I don't want any decimal in the data. So, I will return to the variable view window and reduce the decimals to zeros. This immediately eliminates the decimal places, leaving the data clean and beautiful as you can see it in the data view window.
The next property column is labor. important columns in XPSS because what you write here appears in the analysis process and in the tables and graphs. In giving labels, you can leave space between characters or words and you can use scientific notations or special characters where necessary.
So I will click on each variable cell and give the labels as follows. ID is identification number. Identification number.
I will leave gender as gender. I will assume I am dealing with fish. So I will give the label for length as length of fish in centimeter.
And... Weight of fish in kg. My label seems to be longer than the size of the label column. So I put my cursor between the label and values as you can see and drag it to the right to expand the column so that I can see my full labels. The next property column now is values.
This is another important column in XPSS because this is where you give labels to mostly categorical and ordinal variable values. In our data, we have only one categorical variable, gender, whose values we have to give labels because it is categorical and dichotomous between male and female. Now let's go back to the data view to inspect how many unique values are there in gender.
As you can see, there are only two unique values that is one and two now let's return to the variable view window to give the value label click on the set to activate the blue button then click on the blue button to open the value label dialog box like this in the value space write one and in the label space write mail then click add to associate one with me in the boss again Write 2 in the value space and female in the labor space. Then click add to associate 2 with female in the bus. Please note that the choice of labor for value is simply by personal choice.
So any of the labor can come first for any value. When you are done with associating all the values and labor, then click OK. Now go back to the data view window and you will see all the gender values have been given male and female labels and you can toggle between the labels and values by clicking on this value labels icon at the menu bar. The next column is missing. This is where you fit in the missing value in your data if there are missing values in our data in the data view window.
There is no missing value as you can see. So, I will pass and move on to the next column. The next column is columns. This is where you can increase or decrease the size of the variable column in the data view. When you click on the cell like this, two arrows pointing up and down appear.
Use the up arrow to increase the value of id column to say 16. and use the down arrow to decrease the value of gender column to say 4. If you go back to the data view window, you will see the ID column has increased in size, while the gender column has reduced in size. You can also resize the columns from this data view window by placing the cursor between the ID and gender column headers like this, and drag to the right. to the left to reduce the size of id column and then place the cursor between the gender and length columns header like this and drag to the right to expand the gender column when you return to the variable view window you will see that the values have changed but whichever size you decided to assign to the columns Ensure the data are well fitted within the columns. The next column property now is Align. This is the column where you decide how your data is arranged in lines in each column.
There are three options to doing this. You can align the data to the right, to the center, or to the left. And whichever options you choose does not have direct impact on the analysis process.
So I will click on the right edge of each cell in this column and select center from the drop down options. If you go back to the data view window, you will see that the data are now aligned to the center of the columns. The next property column is measure.
This is where you indicate the type of measure or level of measurement of each variable. There are three options available in SPSS. They are scale measure for scale variable, ordinal measure for ordinal variable, and nominal measure for nominal variables. In this data, ID is a qualitative variable whose value does not represent any ranking.
So it is nominal variable and I will select nominal for ID. Gender is also a qualitative variable whose value does not have ranking. So it's also a nominal variable and I will select nominal measure for gender.
Length is a numeric variable that is a measurable quantity. So it is a scale variable. and I will select scale for length. Weight is also a numeric variable that is a measurable quantity. So it is a scale variable and I will select scale for weight.
The next property column is row. In this column, I will leave everything as input. Now we have completely defined the properties of the variables of the data we copied and pasted on the data.
data view window directly and you cannot go back to the data view window to commence your data analysis but let me show you how to use the file menu options to load in the same data now click on file and from the drop down menu click on open and from the open options i click on data and this opens a dialog box called open data from here and navigate to my data folder like this my data is here in this folder but it's not visible because the files of type is in the default.sav format which is the format for xpss data file now i click on the files of type column and from the drop down options i scroll down and select excel because my data is in Excel and immediately my data file in Excel becomes visible in the data folder as you can see. Now I click on the Excel data file to select it and make it appear on the file name space. Then I click open.
Immediately a new dialog box opens. The box for read variable names from the first row of data is checked by default. So, before I click OK on this dialog box, I ensure that I re-inspected my table of data to be sure the variable names are truly along the first row. If in your data, the variable names are not on the first row, then kindly uncheck this box. Otherwise, you are going to lose your first row data set.
That is, your table of data will be short by one row. So, since my data contains the variable names along the first row, I will check this box back. When I am satisfied with my inspections, then I click OK and this immediately loads the data into the spreadsheet of the SPSS in the data view window.
As you can see, the SPSS also loaded the actual variable names as they are in the Excel file. unlike when the SPSS generated default variable names when I copied and pasted the data directly here on the data view window. Now, let's go into the variable view window once again to define the properties of this variable. As you can see from the variable view window, the name of the variables and the properties of the column for measure are given and defined already. So what you can do now is define the properties of the variables for the remaining columns.
And since I have shown you how to do this before, I will just quickly run through them again. Now we have completely defined the properties of the variables of the data we just loaded into the XPSS. And you can now go back to the data view window to commence your data analysis. In my next video, I will be showing you how to perform data analysis using XPSS.
Now we have come to the end of this video. And thanks for staying with me till this moment. If you like this video and you want to see more content like this, please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel so that you continue to receive notification from me every time I post new and useful content. Subscription is free. Thanks and I see you again in my next video.