11/25/2015Slide 1 Scripts are short programs that repeat sequences of SPSS commands. SPSS includes a computer language called Sax Basic for the creation of scripts and SPSS includes a number of sample scripts to get you started. The scripts which will be available are generally designed to reduce the need to repeat sequences of menu commands. The commands that they replace will be shown in the PowerPoint presentations for doing homework problems.

11/25/2015Slide 2 While the scripts have been tested to make sure they work, they are not designed to handle all of the possible combinations of data and analyses. If you get an error message, close the script and try it again. If it continues to fail, please send me an with details about what you were doing when it stopped working and I will fix it.

11/25/2015Slide 3 To download the scripts, click on the link SPSS Script and Syntax Files on the Course Materials web page.

11/25/2015Slide 4 On the Scripts and Syntax Files web page, right click on the link FrequencyDistribution.SBS and select Save Link As from the popup menu. NOTE: “.SBS” is the file extension for SPSS scripts.

11/25/2015Slide 5 Navigate to the My Documents folder and click on the Save button to save the script to your computer. Repeat these steps to download the script for Contingency Tables.

11/25/2015Slide 6 After opening the data file in SPSS, select the Run Script command from the Utilities menu.

11/25/2015Slide 7 In the Run Script dialog box, navigate to the My Documents directory and highlight the script FrequencyDistribution.SBS. Click on the Run button to activate the script.

11/25/2015Slide 8 When the script dialog box opens, it gives you a message that the script has set the output options so that it can read the output files. The options are set to Names and Labels for variables in the Navigator Outline and Pivot Table titles, and for Values and Labels for values of the variable in output tables.

11/25/2015Slide 9 First, click on a variable name to create the frequency distribution and bar chart. Second, click on the OK button to create the output. The options for the script are set to the features we will commonly want to do.

11/25/2015Slide 10 When the script finishes running, the computer will beep and this message will appear in the status bar. When the script is running, the output window will be brought to the front on the screen. If the output window covers the script dialog, you can click on the minimized icon for the data set and the script dialog will be visible again. The script dialog does not close when the script is finished. It is designed to stay open for continued analysis.

11/25/2015Slide 11 The script produces the frequency table, just as it would appear if you used the SPSS menus. The screen does not refresh completely, leaving this narrow band of a previous screen at the top. I have not found a way to fix it automatically, but resizing the window should correct it.

11/25/2015Slide 12 The script also creates a bar chart that is similar to the bar chart produced by the frequencies command. I like to add frequency counts to the bars so that I don’t have to look back at the table.

11/25/2015Slide 13 Finally, the script produces a table of Odds for each possible combination of categories. For example, respondents were three and a half times more likely to be divorced rather than separated. This is not standard SPSS output, but relies on calculations on the output in the frequency table.

11/25/2015Slide 14 These buttons change the order of the variables in the list box. You can have the bar chart use percentages instead of frequency counts. To close the dialog, click on the Cancel button or the Red X close box. These check boxes reduce of the volume of tables in the output window. Clearing this check box creates the bar chart without the numbers on the bars.

11/25/2015Slide 15 The options in the Contingency Tables script are similar. You select two variable: one for the row variable and one for the column variable. The defaults in the script are set to produce column percentages in the table and the bar chart, which is what we usually want.

11/25/2015Slide 16 The output is the same contingency table that you would produce with the crosstabs command.

11/25/2015Slide 17 The bar chart is clustered on the column variable. The categories of the row variable are color-coded in the legend.

11/25/2015Slide 18 The script produces a table of odds for each category of the column variable and the odds ratio. The odds ratio is calculated for both of the possible combinations: the ratio of the odds for category 1 to the odds for category 2, and the ratio of the odds for category 2 to the odds for category 1.