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I have a dataset in SPSS with categorical variables: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Regularly, Always; and I want to encode them for analysis. I need to assign the value 0 to the first 3 categories, but SPSS doesn't seem to let me to.

I have tried to click on the value column, and assign the label 0 to Never, then Rarely etc, but I can't. Once assigned to Never, you can't assign 0 to Rarely for example.

Does anyone know how to do this kind of encoding?

Paulitania
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  • This is probably well handled by the `RECODE` command. See, for example, https://www.spss-tutorials.com/spss-recode-command/ – hplieninger Mar 23 '20 at 08:42
  • Do you want to change the value labels, or change the values? (or create a new variable with corresponding values?) – eli-k Mar 23 '20 at 09:36

1 Answers1

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Each value of a variable can have only one value label, though you can apply the same value label string to different values. It sounds like your data values are actually Never, Rarely, etc. If that's the case, then you could assign the same label to multiple values, but that wouldn't result in any analyses treating them as the same group as long as the variable has a different string. As previously suggested, if you want them all to be treated as the same, recoding them (or creating a new variable based on recoding) would be necessary.

David Nichols
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