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I am trying to introduce my data into SPSS. At the moment i am very confused. My questionnaire comprises 8 statements, where participants have ranked from strongly disagree to strongly agree their opinions. so far so simple. the only problem is, that for each of the 8 statements there are 8 characters that the participant has to rank. Could you please let me know how can i introduce such multiple items Likert scales?

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To clarify, are you saying you have 8 different 8-point Likert scales, and you want to know whether to combine them (and, if so, how)? – gung Feb 24 '12 at 3:55
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likert-type scales are not ranked, they are rated. What are the characters that people have to rank? Are they the scale levels itself or some different objects? Give more detais please. – ttnphns Feb 24 '12 at 5:31
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-1 for the question because it is quite unclear, and also seems to be not really statistical but just how to introduce data into SPSS. But my comments and questions were too long for comments so see my answer. – Peter Ellis Feb 24 '12 at 22:09

1 Answer

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I suspect "ranked" is a mistake - you just mean "rated", right? I also think you probably mean you have 8 groups of 8 "characters" (what does "character" mean by the way), each of which gets rated on a likert scale?

And I also believe you are just asking how to do the data entry in SPSS, not an analytical question?

If so, you should have one variable for respondent, one for statement; one variable for character; and one for rating. So you have 64 rows for each respondent. And it will look something like (if you have 10 respondents, with the first called Jane and the 10th called Joe - in reality you don't need to track your respondents' names, just their ids):

   Respondent  Statement Character            Rating
1        Jane Statement1         A          disagree
2        Jane Statement1         B             agree
3        Jane Statement1         C          disagree
4        Jane Statement1         D           neither
5        Jane Statement1         E           neither
6        Jane Statement1         F             agree
7        Jane Statement1         G             agree
8        Jane Statement1         H           neither
9        Jane Statement2         A    strongly agree
10       Jane Statement2         B          disagree
11       Jane Statement2         C             agree
12       Jane Statement2         D          disagree
..
640      Joe  Statement8         H             agree
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