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Table of Contents

Creating Value Labels for Categorical Variables in SPSS ............................................. 2

Additional Resources.................................................................................................. 5

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Creating Value Labels for Categorical Variables

Example Q1 from a questionnaire asks: “How strongly do you agree with the following statement?”

“I am satisfied with my current job”

Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

This is an ordinal variable which needs to be coded before entering the responses into SPSS. In the

example below the responses have been coded from 1 to 5, where 1 = Strongly Disagree and 5=

Strongly Agree. These numerical values will be assigned value labels in SPSS.

1. From Variable View, click from the Values column for the variable of interest (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Value Labels dialogue box in SPSS.

Figure 2. Entering Values and Labels via the Value Labels dialogue box.

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2. Define the value of the labels for the variable via the Value Labels dialogue box (Figure 2).

Enter your first value (e.g., 1), as the Value. Enter what that value represents (e.g., Strongly

Disagree) as the Label. Then click Add.

3. Repeat step 2 until you have labelled all your values (Figure 3). Then click OK.

Figure 3. All values have been labelled.

4. From Variable View you will see that the variable now has value labels (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Variable View after value labels have been added.

5. Figure 5 shows what the variable will look like from the Data View. You can choose to either

view the numerical values or the value labels via the icon as shown in Figure 5.

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Figure 5. Q1_JobSatis from Data View with values shown and with labels shown.

Click to show labels

or numerical values

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Additional Resources

In the Getting Started folder under the SPSS resources section, you may be interested in the

following:

1. How to code categorical variables

2. How to enter and define variables

3. How to enter your data into SPSS

4. Levels of Measurement (nominal, ordinal and scale variables)

Are you entering data from a questionnaire? If so you will need to code your categorical variables

before entering your data (refer to the first resource listed above)

* If you are unsure about which variables are categorical (nominal or ordinal), have a look at the

Levels of Measurement guide mentioned above.

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