How to Analyze Open Ended Questions in Spss

An important task when working with check-all-that-apply questions is being able to say how many people did not answer the question. This task is not as straightforward as it is with single-choice multiple-choice questions, where we can simply count the number of missing values in a single column. That approach will not work with multiple-response questions, because the answers are spread across multiple variables, and can be selected independently. For example, someone who responds that they own a phone will still have missing values for laptop and tablet and other. This person clearly answered the question, despite having "missing values" on some of the variables in the set. It stands to reason that a person who did not answer the question must have missing values on all variables in the response set. How do we count the number of nonmissing responses a person gave?

Additionally, we may want to know how many options respondents tended to select. Did most people only select 1 option, or did most people tend to select 2 or 3 options?

We can answer both of these questions using the Count Values Within Cases procedure in SPSS. This procedure takes a set of variables and counts the number of times a specific value occurs for a given case/row. This "count" is added as a new variable to the dataset, which we can then use to apply filters.

In our example data, we used the number 1 to indicate "present", so we want to count the number of 1's a person has across the four multiple response variables. We can use Count Values Within Cases to count the number of "checked boxes" for a given respondent. If someone does not have any 1's, they will have a count of 0.

Count Values Within Cases can be configured to count any number or range of numbers, and can even count missing values. In this example, we choose to count the number of 1's, so individuals who selected zero choices will have values of 0, and individuals who answered the question will have counts greater than 0. This interpretation is more intuitive, and makes it easy to filter out non-responders.

Running the Procedure

Using the Dialog Windows

1. Click Transform > Count Values within Cases.
2. In the Target Variable box, type a name for the new variable to be created. Let's call our new variable selected.
3. Double click on the variables owns_laptop, owns_phone, owns_tablet, and owns_other in the left column to move them to the Variables box.
   
4. Click Define Values.
5. In the left column, type the number 1 in the Value box, then click Add. You should see the number 1 added to the Values to Count column.
   
   Click Continue to save the change.
6. Click OK.

Using Syntax

          COUNT selected=owns_laptop owns_phone owns_tablet owns_other(1). EXECUTE.        

In this syntax:

• COUNT is the name of the procedure.
• The name of the new variable to be created, selected, appears to the left of the equals sign.
• After the equals sign, we list the names of all variables to count. We use spaces between the variable names.
• After the name of the last variable, we put the value to count in parentheses. In this case, we are counting the value 1.
• The statement ends with a period.
• The EXECUTE statement tells SPSS to carry out the computation and write the result to the active dataset. (If you run the COUNT statement without the EXECUTE statement, SPSS will "queue up" the command, but not actually carry it out.)

Output

The Output window will display the syntax from the Count Values within Cases command, but will not show any table output. To see the result, go into the Data Editor window; if we were successful, our new variable should appear at the end of the dataset (you may need to scroll to the right to see it).

Notice how cases 1, 2, and 5 had values of 1 for owns_laptop, owns_phone, and owns_tablet, and that their value of selected is 3. Cases 3, 4, 6, and 8 had values of 1 for owns_laptop and owns_phone, so their value of selected is 2. Case 7 only had a 1 for owns_phone, so their value of selected is 1.

We can now look at how many devices the respondents owned by creating a frequency table of variable selected (Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Frequencies).

From this table, we can see that six (6) respondents did not select any electronic devices. Keep this number in mind when reviewing the Multiple Response Frequencies output in the next example.

This table also tells us:

• Thirty-four (34) respondents, or 7.8% of the sample, own a single electronic device.
• Two-hundred forty (240) respondents, or 55.2% of the sample, own two electronic devices.
• One-hundred forty-three (143) respondents, or 32.9% of the sample, own three electronic devices.
• Twelve (12) respondents, or 2.8% of the sample, own four electronic devices (i.e., selected all four answer options).

To filter out individuals who did not answer the multiple response question, use the Select Cases procedure to keep cases if selected > 0 (selected greater than 0).

How to Analyze Open Ended Questions in Spss

Source: https://libguides.library.kent.edu/SPSS/Multiple-Response-Sets

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