Forum Discussion
Label categorical data - Please help!
Hi,
I'm working with market research data that I imported from SPSS (first exporting to Excel and then connecting from there). Some of my variables are categorical - for instance, Ethnicity -- where in SPSS they were coded as 1=Caucasian 2=AA 3=Asian. I originally imported my data with the data labels and everything categorical was a string which did not work well, so I reimported my data as numeric -- however, let's say I am reporting a stacked bar by Year on the axis, and I have the variable for Race as Legend. Now my Race values are labeled as 1, 2, 3 instead of Caucasian, AA, Asian, etc...
What is the best way to handle this? Is there a way to label the data? Or compute a new measure with IF statements into a string column? Help!!
Thanks!
Add a table with the translation of ID to Description, join it to the fact table on the ID, then use the Description field as your category. Below I show a partial data model that I have used, where "Answer" is a number and "Translation" is the description of that number (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, etc).
Hope this helps
David
4 Replies
Add a table with the translation of ID to Description, join it to the fact table on the ID, then use the Description field as your category. Below I show a partial data model that I have used, where "Answer" is a number and "Translation" is the description of that number (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, etc).
Hope this helps
David
That is a great approach.
I ended up finding two other solutions, but yours is much better.
I did a grouping of the variable, and I also did a new calculated column using a SWITCH function.
But moving forward, I will create a data label file from SPSS for Market Research data and set the relationship, so I'm really glad I asked!
I tried out this solution and I'm running into an issue.
So, my answer data table looks like:
Unique ID
Question1
Question2
Question3
Question4
Let's say Question 1 responses are 1 and 2 where 1="Yes" and 2="No". Let's say Question 2 responses in the data are 1, 2 and 3 where 1 = Not at all likely" 2 "Moderately likely" and 3 = "Extremely Likely". I only have the numeric responses that correspond to those labels in my data.
So I have another table that has 3 colums:
Variable Name
Variable Value
Variable Label
It would have Question 1, 1, Yes; Question 1, 2, No.
How can I link those together so I can label my data in tables and graphs?
