Re: How to code hazards across house rooms

Posted by Rich Ulrich on Feb 08, 2013; 7:18am
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/How-to-code-hazards-across-house-rooms-tp5717973p5717977.html

Think about what someone will be writing up.  What is the narrative?
(You don't tell us that, but you might assume that it is safer to look
at a wider rather than a narrower range of options, even if there is a
firmly stated, and limited, purpose.)

It seems to me that collapsing everything you know about hazards
into one number is premature.  Just for starters, you *will*  want to
know the total number of hazards, which requires the the total number
of all hazards in each household -- which might be more than 14. 
Hazards-per-room also seems useful to report. 

The "number of different hazards"  might go along with a mention of
non-prevalent hazards, and gives an additional perspective on risk.
That is the one that might be important for assessing the success of
any educational or other preventative measures. 

--
Rich Ulrich

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Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2013 19:21:43 -0500
From: [hidden email]
Subject: How to code hazards across house rooms
To: [hidden email]

Dear List:  I have just received an SPSS data file from a colleague that contains responses from a City’s elderly residents who reported on safety hazards within their homes/apartments. Each room could have anywhere from 10 to 14 hazards that the residents had to check off. We are interested in getting a total hazards score for  the five rooms (across the kitchen, living room, bedroom, dining room, and bathroom). However, I have noticed that not all of the residents had five rooms. Some lived in efficiency apartments and only had two rooms. If I totaled up the number of hazards across all rooms  those with fewer rooms would automatically have lower hazards. If I obtained the mean across all of the rooms than residents could have the same mean number of hazards but it would be based upon a different number of rooms. I am trying to figure out how to factor in the number of rooms. Some way of weighting the scores but I am a bit dumbfounded on this. I realize that this is not an SPSS question but would appreciate suggestions (if you would like to chime in) as I begin to figure out how to analyze the data.  Thanks in advance,   martin

 

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