Re: Help with macros

Posted by Art Kendall on
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Help-with-macros-tp5740865p5740877.html

In 50 years of using SPSS and other software, I have never seen an application where cases have different numbers of variables in a set. It is certainly possible to have cases to have different numbers of valid values and user-missing values in a set. The number of valid values + the number of missing values is a constant across cases.

Why would one want to have different numbers of variables in multiple response sets (MRSets) in different cases?

In de-duplicated MRSets it is possible the  number of variables is cut down to be the maximum number of valid responses in ANY case.  However, it is often simpler to have the same number of variables in the result MRset as in the raw input MRSET. In that instance some variables would just have missing values indicating the respondent made fewer responses.

Having different cases have different numbers of variables would require more complex code. In addition if you are sending the data to other packages there is a risk the software would fill in zeros or its version of system-missing.