Statistical testing question from a novice

Posted by Robert Morgan-3 on Aug 18, 2006; 1:00pm
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Statistical-testing-question-from-a-novice-tp1070378.html

I'm a stats & SPSS novice, and I'm trying to think through a statistical
testing question I have.

My company fielded a survey composed of both a local Web panel and
respondents gathered via pop-up solicitations on our Web site. I'm only
interested in analyzing from the Web panel universe.

For a large number of questions, I want to compare panel respondents that
are Women 25-54 with all panel respondents to see if there are significant
differences between Women 25-54 on the panel and all panel respondents. For
the discussion I'll assume I'm dealing with ordinal-level data
(i.e. "daily", "several times a week", "several times a month", "once a
month or less", "never").

My thinking is that this type of comparison would constitute a
nonparametric test of paired samples, so the best test to use would be a
Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

In order to create my variable of Women 25-54 from the Web panel in SPSS, I
would need to use a Boolean operation to create the variable - would I
simply use "Transform," then "Recode into Different Variables"? Is that the
best way to create new groupings of the sample? I've always used "Select
Cases," but that doesn't permanently change the selection. I'm not sure how
I should create that new grouping to submit it for testing within SPSS.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on how to approach this.