Posted by
Art Kendall on
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/How-to-remove-extraneous-value-labels-Keep-only-that-actuallu-occur-in-data-tp5739723p5739737.html
Thank you for the feedback.
It would be a good tool for quality assurance in data definition to be able
to get a warning if say a variable had 25 or 50 values and all/some were
unlabelled.
I have worked out a better formulations of what I need to clean up the value
labels. (Boy do I wish these people had input from experienced researchers
before they created their dataset.)
(The NGO will often not have SPSS available when it uses the reorganized
data.)
What I am trying to do is look at the* valid *values that occur across all
the countries and repeats. A lot of work went into having the same values
indicate the reasons data is missing across all the variables.
Fortunately there are no valid negative values in the data.
Some variables could have the values in alphabetical order.
Ordinal variables need to have the labels in a particular order.
I have gone ahead with a manual kludge approach, -- accumulate a syntax file
this way:
save an extra copy of the dataset as is.
open spss and open the data set.
DATASET COPY to get a working copy.
open a new syntax file
go to the variables view of the working copy.
right click a variable name
click <descriptive statistics>
go to the output window
copy-and-paste the variable name, old values and labels into the syntax
file
edit the pasted text into RECODE and VALUE LABELS
highlight and run those two commands
go to the dataset window
right click the variable name again
click <descriptive statistics>
go to the output window
eyeball the results
If okay delete the contents of the output window,
else delete the contents of the output window,
DATASET CLOSE the working dataset and DATASET COPY .
-------------
A suggestion to IBM/SPSS
Many programs have the ability to present a list and allow the user to
slide rows up and down.
it would be great if SPSS has a tool with 3 or 4 columns
-- sequence number which stays in place
-- possiblly a column with the old value
-- the label
-- column the contained 'valid' or 'missing"
The resulting RECODE, VALUE LABELS, and MISSING VALUES syntax would then be
pasted.
-----
Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants
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Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants