Ishan Talks: PSPP: a free and open source alternative to SPSS – Part 3 (Introduction to Data View and Variable View)

Your PSPP interface will look like the following upon start up. It is quite similar to the popular SPSS interface and is distantly similar to the MS Excel interface.

Two of the most important tabs you will be using in PSPP are the “Data View” and the “Variable View” tabs at the bottom.

By default the interface will display the Data View tab upon start up. This view displays the actual data you will be analysing. However the Variable View tab holds all the key parameters behind the analysis of the data. As such, let us first have a look at the Variable View tab.

The Variable View:

The Variable View follows the row and column format. As the name suggests, this view is used to define the variables for your data. The rows are used to define individual variable such as name, age, gender etc. and the columns are used to define the various parameters of each variable such as type, number of decimal points etc.

Let’s look at each of the parameters

Name: a short identifier given to each variable. This is usually a single word.
Type: the type of the variable.

Width: the width of the data. This is set to 8 by default.
Decimals: the precision of your data.
Label: a short description of the data.
Values: what the numerical data represent. For example 1 = Male and 2 = Female for Gender. More on this later on.

Missing: how missing (incomplete) responses are handled. More on this later on.
Columns: the width of the column which represents your data. This is set to 8 by default.
Align: the alignment of your data within the column.
Scale: the scale of measurement of your data (nominal, ordinal or scale)

The Data View:

Once you have completed defining your variables, you can start populating your data through the Data View. Each row represents one set of data.