The Data Preparation Tutorial has been designed to assist you in getting your data into the correct shape for analysis in SPSS. The tutorial enables you to transfer your data from Excel to SPSS in a way that circumvents a multitude of potential problems which would arise from a quick copy-paste approach. The comprehensive advice provided is based on several years of experience of those particular issues which students consistently need advice on prior to performing statistical procedures with their data.
Please make full use of this tutorial together with the accompanying spreadsheets to help you arrange your data in the appropriate form. It is recommended that you use the PowerPoint version of the presentation, as this has been designed to work interactively so as to guide you through the various steps in an appropriate order. The PowerPoint presentation and the data files can be used simultaneously. In order to ensure that the Excel and SPSS files are readily accessible during your use of the tutorial it is recommended that in the first instance you ensure that you open up the package SPSS on the computer you are using. Once this package is running in the background, you will find that it is much more quick and easy to open up any one of the two SPSS spreadsheets as and when required.
As a cautionary note, please bear in mind that it is always wise to keep a back-up copy of your original data file for future reference and that therefore you should avoid saving any revised versions under the same filename as the original. In the event that you unintentionally delete data, it is good to have a master copy to refer back to! Furthermore, in preparation for managing your prepared data, you should take some time out to consider the tutorials Storage and Security and Data Protection Rights & Access (source: EDINA and Data Library, University of Edinburgh). If you are a student engaged in curricular research, please note that that the references to ethical approval in the second tutorial do not apply here, as all aspects of ethical approval ought to have been addressed by your both you and your supervisor during the process of finalising your project proposal, and therefore in advance of data collection.
Data Preparation Tutorial
preparing for SPSS (version 0)
cardiac surgery data (version 0)
cardiac surgery data (version 1)
Data Preparation Tutorial by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
