Session 3

Designing a simple questionnaire in SPSS and SPSS

Data Entry

page

Starting SPSS Data Entry Builder 3-2

Adding a title 3-3
Adding questions 3-6
Entering Data using SPSS Data Entry 3-13
Simple Analysis Using SPSS 3-15
Practical Session 3 3-22

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SESSION 3: Designing a simple questionnaire in SPSS and
SPSS Data Entry

Starting SPSS Data Entry Builder

From the Start Menu at the bottom of your desktop click on Programs ¾
SPSS Data Entry ¾ SPSS Data Entry Builder. The following screens are
opened.
Design Form
Details Form

In the Design Form you can build the questionnaire and you can change the
design and the layout.

In the Details Form, you can store the details of each question, the values
assigned to each answer, the rules, etc.

You can also get a toolbox which is what you would used to add questions to
your form design.

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 This is the pointer. Use this to select objects on your form.

This is used to add a text box question.

This is used to add an open button question.

This is used to add a check box question.

This is used to add a drop down list question

This is used to add a single selection list box question.

This is used to add a scale button matrix question.

This is used to add text.

This is used to add automatic numbering.

This is used to add another question.

This is used to insert a picture onto the form.

This is used to draw a rectangle on the form.

This is used to draw a line on the form.

You cannot save a new project until you have entered some questions, so
let’s start building a questionnaire in the blank form we’ve been given (Form
1).

Adding a title

For this session, I will try to reproduce a simple questionnaire on the SPSS
Data Entry Builder.

The 1st thing that you are likely to do in a new questionnaire is write the title of
the questionnaire.

Click on the text tool . You will see that the cursor changes to ‘A’. Place
the cursor on the form where you want the left-hand top of your title box to be,
and drag the cursor to create the entire box.

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 This creates a text
box in your form

You might have noticed that besides the toolbox and the 2 forms that have
opened automatically, SPSS Data Entry Builder has also opened the
Properties Form.
Default properties

properties
Editable

Every item that you add on the design form will have properties linked to it.
These properties will differ depending on the type of item that is being added.
We can modify the right hand part of the properties with new values. So if we
wanted to add a title ‘Phone Poll’ just click on the Text Field, and replace the
right hand side with Phone Poll as shown.

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You will see that the design form is updated automatically.

This gives you the default style for your text, but you might want to change the
font, size or colour of your text.

You can change the way your text looks by using the Properties Form.

• Change the height of the font to 50.

• Change the colour to Blue.

• Add a border to the box.

• Centre the text within the box.

• Can also change the font colour by clicking

Font.

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You can then drag and drop the sides of the box until you get the text in the
middle as shown here.

Adding Questions

We will try to reproduce some parts of the questionnaire, which you will
complete during the practical session.

The questionnaire will consist of 3 questions:

Sex of respondent (Q8 in survey)

Age of respondent (Q7 in survey)
Voting Party (Q5 in survey)

Sex of Respondent

This is a multiple choice type question – there are only 2 options available,
and each respondent will select only one of the choices. Since there are few
options available, we will select an open button style question.

From the toolbar, click on the open button tool .

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You will notice that you have an option of selecting the number of choices that
you will have, as well as the design.

For this example, I will choose the 2x1 option. If you move the cursor on your
form, you will see that it has changed to a . symbol. Place the cursor on the
form where you want the left-hand top of your question box to be, and drag
the cursor to form the entire box.

You can select the question or the response individually and change the text
or its properties as you did with the title. So after modifying the text, the
questionnaire now looks like this.

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An important feature present in SPSS Data Entry Builder is the Variable
Properties form. To obtain this, choose any one variable in the open button
box, and right click on it. This will open the short cut menu. Click on Variable
Properties in this menu.

This will give you the Variable Properties form. Note that it has tabs across
the top, enabling you to edit different aspects of the variable.

At the moment, the Variable name is given to be VAR000004. This is not

really used statistically, however if you need to analyse the data, then I would

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always suggest to give suitable names to your variable names. The label is
Gender.

The default value is the value provided to the variable by default. In this case
this value determines the default state of the option button. At the moment it
will be left blank.

If you click on the values tab, you will get the following.

This is a list of all the options that we have for the question. Press Close.

Age of Respondent

Although in most cases this variable is analysed as a categorical variable, I

will collect the data as continuous, and then this could be change to
categorical later on.

The variable is going to be a simple box in which the respondent can enter
their age (in years).

From the toolbar, click on the text question tool, . Move the cursor on to
your form and you will see that it has changed to ‘ab|’ symbol. As before,
place the cursor on the form where you want the left-hand top of your
question to be and drag the cursor to form the entire box.

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Modify the question properties by using the Properties form. Your form
should now look like the one below.

Voting Party

Modify this question to read

Tick any party that you have voted to in the past:

Labour
Conservative
Lib / Dem

This question is going to have 3 possible responses. The respondent may

therefore select any of these 4 responses, and we therefore need to allow for
up to 4 tick/selection boxes. This is known as a multiple response question.

We will use check boxes to represent the political parties and we therefore
need 3 check boxes for this question.

Move your cursor over the check box tool on the toolbar , but remember to
change the setting to 3x1 check boxes. Move the cursor over your form.
Click where you want the top left of the question box to go and you should get
the default definition for this question.

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We now need to edit this question, so use the Variable Properties dialogue
as before.

• Edit the Question text so that it

reads ‘Tick any party that you have
voted to in the past (please select all
that apply)’.

• Un-check the ‘link with set label’ box.

• Change the label so that it reads

‘Voting Party’.

Now the question should look as

follows:

• Drag & drop the edges of the

question and the question text so
that you can read the entire
question.

• Click on each of the individual

question texts in turn so that they
give the 3 different political parties.

If you want that SPSS Data Entry Builder wraps the text in the question, make
sure that you change AutoWrap to True in the Properties Form.

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The question should look as follows:

One thing which we have not discussed is the Details Form.

At the moment, it is only showing that we have a Form, where we have stored
all information. However, we can see all variables that we have created. If
you click on , you would obtain a detailed list of all the variables present in
your form. Next to every variable name, you will be given the label as well as
the type (string, numeric, etc.) of the variable. You can see now why it makes
more sense to give every variable a suitable variable name.

We have now completed the 1st simple questionnaire. The screen should look
like this.

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When you are happy with the format of the design, save the survey by clicking
on File ¾ Save As…. You can call the file politics.sav. Note that this file
has the same extension as an SPSS data file.

Entering Data using SPSS Data Entry

Once you have created the survey, the next stage is to start inputting the
data.

Suppose 10 people replied to the questionnaire as follows:

Respondent Sex Age Political Party

1 Male 18 Labour
2 Male 39 Labour, Conservative
3 Female 41 Labour, Lib/Dem
4 Male 45 Labour, Conservative
5 Female 36 Labour, Lib/Dem
6 Female 38 Conservative
7 Male 36 Labour, Lib/Dem
8 Male 31 Labour
9 Male 40 Labour, Conservative
10 Female 30 Labour

To enter data, you need to be viewing either form entry or table entry. We
will use form entry.

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Click on View¾ Form Entry. Once you are viewing the Form Entry, you can
enter data by selecting the buttons or click boxes, and by entering ‘Age’ in the
correct box.

The new case

navigation toolbar
at the top of the
window allows you
to move within
each record of
each respondent.

First Case
Previous Case
Next Case Last Case Add new case

To enter the 1st case:

• Click on the male button.

• Enter his age (18).

• Click on the box indicating

that he voted for Labour.

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Click on the Add New Case button , to enter the details of the next
respondent.

When you have entered the details for all 10 respondents, you have to save
your data so that we are able to read this from SPSS. This is done by clicking
on File¾ Save, to save the questionnaire along with the data.

Secondly, we also want to export this data so that we can use SPSS to
produce graphs and tables. Click on File¾ Export Data.

This will open the following form.

Call this new file something different, otherwise the data will overwrite the
questionnaire design.

Simple Analysis using SPSS

The data exported from SPSS Data Entry can easily be read by SPSS. Open
SPSS and load the data file eg1data.sav.

Your data should appear in the SPSS Data Editor window as follows:

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Look at the variable names. If we had changed them to a more meaningful
name in SPSS Data Entry Builder, then we would have some information
regarding the variable. Therefore, spend some time modifying the variable
names, and value labels by clicking on the Variable View tab at the bottom of
the sheet.

• Click on individual
variable names to
change them (for
example change
var00004 to sex and
var00011 to age.

We might want to add

the labels Yes and No
to codes 1 and 0 for
variables 12 to 14.

This should be the completed Variable View.

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If you go back to Data View, and click on the label tool, on the toolbar at
the top of the window, you will be able to see the labels that you have just
defined in your data.

This is much more readable.

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To produce a frequency table for the gender, click on Analyze¾ Descriptive
Statistics.

Highlight the
variable Gender
(sex) and move it to
the Variables box.

Click on OK.

The output window contains the following information.

You can see that all the

data has been entered
and there is no missing
data.

The frequency table

shows us that there
were 6 males and 4
females in the data set.

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To produce frequency counts for the voting preference according to gender,
we need to use cross-tabulation. Click on Analyze¾ Descriptive Statistics
¾ Crosstabs.

• Select the voting

variables from the
left-hand list and put
them in the row(s)
box.

• Select the gender

variable and put it
into the Column(s)
list.

Click on OK.
In the output window, you will then get a table for each of the voting
preference split by the gender of the respondent.

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Suppose we wanted to obtain a bar chart showing how many males/females
voted (or did not vote) Conservative. Click on Graphs¾ Bar¾ Clustered¾
Define.

• Select the
conservative
variable from the
list on the left and
put it in the
Category Axis
box.

• Select the gender

variable and place
it in the Define
Clusters by: box.

Click on OK.

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This is not a particularly 3.0

attractive chart- we may want

to change the scales or the 2.5

axis, or the titles, or the 2.0

colours, etc and it is possible
to do this easily by double 1.5
clicking on the chart. Gender
1.0
Male
Count

.5 Female
no yes

Conservative

What we may want to do is to produce a bar chart that has a simple bar for
the number of males/females and their political preference.

To do this we again go to the bar chart as before,

but select Summaries of separate variables
button.

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 • Select gender and
again put it in the
Category Axis box.
• Now select all 3 voting
preference and put
them in the Bars
Represent: box.

Note that the bars are set

by default to represent the
MEAN of the variables,
but we want them to
represent the number of
people who said Yes to
each question, so we
need to change the
Summary function.

Click on the Change Summary function.

This window actually looks more
complex than it is. We want the
% of males/females who said yes,
so we need the % whose answer
was coded as 1 and not those
coded as 0.

After this, we can take the

summary function representing
the % of people who gave an
answer above 0.5.

• So click on the button

Percentage above.

• Then type 0.5 in the Value box.

• Click on Continue to get back to the previous dialogue box, and then OK
to produce the chart.

You should get a chart like the one below.

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 120

100

80

60

40

Labour
20
Conservative
% > .5

0 Lib/Dem
Male Female

Gender

The titles could perhaps do with changing and the scale altering. Double click
on the chart to put the chart in editing mode.

Practical Session 3
1. Open a new SPSS Data Entry Builder and enter the questionnaire with
suitable formatting. Save the questionnaire as politics.sav.

Draft Questions for Phone Poll

1. There is to be a general election in June for a new government. Did you know
about it?

YES/NO/DON’T KNOW

2. Do you think that the current government made a difference to you and your
family?

YES/NO/DON’T KNOW

3. How likely are you to vote in the election?

VERY LIKELY
FAIRLY LIKELY
UNSURE
FAIRLY UNLIKELY
VERY UNLIKELY

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 4. Which Party did you vote for in the past? Labour
Conservative
Lib/Dem
Other
Varies
Don’t know
Don’t vote

5. How old are you? 17-25

26-40
41-55
56+

6. What is your gender? Male/Female

2. Fill the questionnaire with 10 different cases.

3. Save the questionnaire and export the data to SPSS for Windows.

4. Modify the value labels and variable names.

5. Obtain a frequency distribution for questions 4 and 5.

6. Obtain suitable bar charts for the 2 questions.

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