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Good day, guys. I'm new to SPSS and I plan to determine if there is any relationship between grades and time spent in watching tv/video game playing using Spearman's rank correlation. Question is, how do I input time variable? Do I convert say, 2 hours and 30 mins to mins so that I would put 150 under the time tab?

My research led me to this but I don't really get it: "The answer is making the data into range whereby all the range has equal measurement( I mean for example 45mn in a range so that I would be [0-45] [46-90] and so on....so you have already done with data arrangement. Last but not least give integer to them (1=[0-45],2=[46-90].......) and you can finally enter to spss."

Any help would be extremely appreciated. :) (And if possible, with explanation. Thank you soooo much :D)

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If you want to use Spearman's rank correlation, then yes, converting 2:30 to 150 minutes is the right way to go. This gives a consistent meaning to all numbers you enter: it is simply the number of minutes. Of course, you could also do this with hours, in which case 2:30 could be entered as 2.5, 54 minutes could be entered as .9, and so on. The only trick is getting all observations on the same scale.

It looks like your quote is suggesting grouping the values between 0–45 minutes into one bin, which is a pretty bad idea, so I'd leave that source alone if I were you. If you're open to alternatives to Spearman's rank correlation, you might want to consider Kendall's tau. For comparison of these, see:

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  • $\begingroup$ I find your answer very useful! Thank you sooooo much! $\endgroup$
    – troubledwater
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 1:53

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