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spssqualtrics

Change multiple answer to one

I made the mistake of leaving the "What is your gender" question as a multiple choice in Qualtrics instead of a "pick one".

I exported the data to SPSS and this makes me unable to do correlations etc.
Is there an easy way to fit the answers given back into one variable, in which 1=male 2=female 3=other?

Instead of 3 different variables with
1 Male
1 Female
1 Other

Solution

  • say your variables are male, female, other, you can use this:

    if male=1 sex=1. 
if female=1 sex=2. 
if other=1 sex=3.
value labels sex
   1  'male'
   2  'female'   
   3  'other'.

    Now you'll have to decide what happens if respondents selected more than one possible answer. The simplest solution could be:

    if sum(male, female, other)>1 sex=$sysmis.

    On the other hand, if you want to lose as little data as possible, you could go this way for example:

    if male=1 and other=1 sex=1.
if female=1 and other=1 sex=2.
if male=1 and female=1 sex=$sysmis.