Gene,

that worked like a charm! Exactly what I needed. Thanks!

Taylor

-----Original Message----- From: SPSSX(r) Discussion on behalf of Gene Maguin Sent: Wed 10/14/2009 9:45 AM To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: determining missingness for a open ended response item Taylor,

There's probably several ways of doing this but one way is to compute the length of the text string. A length of 0 indicates a blank string. As in,

Compute length=char.length(TextVariable).

>>I have a large dataset that consists of responses to a survey. One of my variables contains the text of an open-ended response item. I would like to figure out how many people did not respond to this item (i.e., blank as opposed to any text). I haven't had any luck using descriptives or the MVA command since. Basically, I just want to calculate how many completely blank cells there are for a string variable. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks, Taylor

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