Computing Age from DOB in SPSS

There are million ways to do this. but here is what worked for me. You will need your date of birth variable to have month, day and year.

COMPUTE age_year = (DATE.MDY(11,01,2010) - BirthDate) / (60*60*24*365.25) .

COMPUTE age=RND(age_year).
FORMATS age (F3.0).
*fre age.

NOTE: This will create an AGE variable, as of now, not the age of respondent at the time of survey. To do that you would need survey date.

String to Numeric in SPSS

STRING m1 (A10).

execute.

compute m1 = substr(query_co,1,1).

execute.

list m1.

Statistical games

http://www.ssc.rdg.ac.uk/software/games/stat_games.html

Sampling definitions

Want to learn basics of sampling in surveys?

Here are some simple ones: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/Samples/purposivesampling.htm

Really useful site on SPSS

Check this out for a comprehensive and easy to use guide on SPSS command.

http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wlm/ein_spss.htm

Creating a string variable to calculate BTH participation till 2006

*Create a string variable by the name years. The variable a width of 7 characters but i ended up using just one. Then Use IF command to assign "1" to the variable in all cases where the year was less than 2006.*****

string years (A7).

if year1="2001-02" | year1="2002-03" | year1="2003-04" | year1="2004-05" | year1="2005-06" years="1".
if year2="2001-02" | year1="2002-03" | year1="2003-04" | year1="2004-05" | year1="2005-06" years="1".
if year3="2001-02" | year1="2002-03" | year1="2003-04" | year1="2004-05" | year1="2005-06" years="1".
if year4="2001-02" | year1="2002-03" | year1="2003-04" | year1="2004-05" | year1="2005-06" years="1".
if year5="2001-02" | year1="2002-03" | year1="2003-04" | year1="2004-05" | year1="2005-06" years="1".

fre years.

list Year1 Year2 Year3 Year4 Year5 TotalYears years.

**Frequency of only those cases who meet the above criteria, ie less than 2006********.

temp.
select if years="1".
fre TotalYears/sta=all.

Really basic stats: what can we do with these variables?

Here is a quick guide for statistics that are ok to compute with kind of variable:

OK to compute....	Nominal	Ordinal	Interval	Ratio
frequency distribution.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
median and percentiles.	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
add or subtract.	No	No	Yes	Yes
mean, standard deviation, standard error of the mean.	No	No	Yes	Yes
ratio, or coefficient of variation.	No	No	No	Yes

Source: http://www.graphpad.com/faq/viewfaq.cfm?faq=1089