JC,

Heed all of Art Kendall's advice, and look at the following SPSS commands:

COMPUTE SCALE1 = MEAN (item1,item2,item2,item4,item5,item6,item7) .

do not divide this statement by 7. Just use the mean function. Make sure that all of the items are pointed in the direction that you want to score them.

If you have some missing data, and want to compute means on cases that have at least six of the seven items, try this:

COMPUTE SCALE1 = MEAN.6 (item1,item2,item2,item4,item5,item6,item7) .

For the overall sample mean, standard deviation, etc. you want

DESCRIPTIVES VAR = SCALE1 SCALE2 SCALE3.

This should at least get you started. When you have done these steps, look into the RELIABILITY command to determine how internally consistent your scales are (and whether the items are pointed in the direction they should be).

HTH,

Stephen Brand www.statisticsdoc.com

---- JC <jc9dy@VIRGINIA.EDU> wrote: > I am new to SPSS and need help working with survey data. I administered a > survey to 60 students. There are three separate scales on the survey. Each > scale has 7-8 questions with five possible responses (almost never, not very > often, etc.). Only one answer is allowed per question. I entered the scale > questions as separate variables (q12, q15, etc) in the variable view and > gave values for each participant's response to each question (values = 1-5). > > I need to do two things: > > 1) Calculate each participant's (60 separate cases) mean score for each of > the three scales. The overall mean for each scale can range from 1-5. > > 2) I should end up with a profile for each participant that looks something > like this: > > Participant #1 Mean score for scale #1(7 questions)= 3.5; Mean score > for scale #2 (8 questions) = 4.0; Mean score for scale #3 (7 questions)= 3.1 > > 3) Then, for each scale I need an overall mean and std deviation for all > participants, so three overall means and three std devs. Maybe this is > called a group mean and std dev for all cases/participants on each separate > scale (?) > > If this is a compute function then please be very specific about the > necessary syntax. I already tried the compute option and the default > function, for example for one scale— MEAN(var1,var2, var3, var4, var5, var6, > var7)/7 —and this didn't work. I tried to name that new variable BES (S for > scale) and was still unable to compute 60 separate means for the 7 questions > on that scale. The new variable appeared useless. > > Sorry this is long but I want to be clear. I am very frustrated at not being > able to do this simple thing on SPSS when it is a snap on EXCEL. > > Regards, > > JC

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