Date:         Mon, 18 Mar 2002 16:03:04 -0500
Reply-To:     Patricia Cleland <Patricia.Cleland@eqao.com>
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Patricia Cleland <Patricia.Cleland@eqao.com>
Subject:      Re: more effecient  IF statements-THANKS
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial query, especially Jon Fry, Daniel Sharp, Lawrence Hotchkiss and Zachary Feinstein who suggested that adding the board id via match files would be more efficient.  It worked beautifully.

Thanks,

Pat

-----Original Message-----
From: Patricia Cleland [mailto:Patricia.Cleland@eqao.com]
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 8:59 AM
To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: more effecient IF statements


I've adapted Raynald's syntax that adds a label to a value so that it
produces a file that computes the school board identifier for each school .
(For example, IF (schmiden=    78) brdmiden =66036. ) The problem is that
there are more than 5,000 public and private elementary schools in the
province of Ontario and so I have more than 5,000 IF statements.  Running
them takes about 1 sec per 100 cases.  Since I have 140,000 cases ( one case
per student per grade) in my data file, it takes about 20 minutes to run all
the cases.  Unfortunately the school id's were assigned alphabetically so
there is no relation between school id and board id that I can use.  Does
anyone have a suggestion for a more efficient way to do this?

Thanks,

Pat

--------------------------------------------------------------
Patricia Cleland,
Assessment Officer,
Data and Operations Unit,
Education Quality and Accountability Office
Suite 1200, 2 Carlton Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5B 2M9

phone:416-314-7950
fax:     416-325-6622
email: patricia.cleland@eqao.com