Thomas,

Maybe I don't understand something, but why can't you just count status.x variables that have a specific value?

Gene Maguin

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Balmer, Thomas Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 5:51 AM To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Counting and constraints

Hi

In order to explain my problem, here what's the situation and what I have done so far:

1. A dataset with about 30'000 cases; a case is a course and a person ; when a person attended more than one course, she/he appears equal to the number of courses.

2. In order to get a person just once I changed cases to variables.

3. Now I got a person as a case with additional variables : courseID1 to courseID10; year.1 to year.10 (which is the year a course was attended) ; status.1 to status.10 (which is an additional information to the course).

4. I figured out with the list's help to count how many courses are mentioned in the dataset per person, say in the year 2010 : COUNT NumberOfCourses10=year.1 .2 year.3 year.4 year.5 year.6 year.7 year.8 year.9 year.10 (10).

But now I have to consider constraints : the variables status1 to status10 contains the information, whether a person really 'attended', stayed on the 'waiting list' , the course was 'cancelled' (and others, always as strings).

I'd like now to count the number of courses a year with the constraint, that this person also attended it, which means for the year 2010: year.1=10 AND status.1='attended'. So it should count the value 10 in the variable year.1 only if this course was attended.

How can I put this constraint in the syntax ?

Thanks !

Tom