UPCOMING WEBINAR: Run Research Your Way With AI Skills This article describes how to manually enter data so it is usable as a data set for Displayr.
Requirements
Either a spreadsheet, a data collection platform, or an optical character recognition (OCR) tool.
Method - Create a spreadsheet (eg, Excel)
- Ensure the first row includes the names of your questions.
- For multiple-variable questions, include the common question name in each column.
- Include a unique ID column.
- Below the header row should be one row for each respondent.
- Use value labels (eg, Male, Female) instead of value numbers.
- For multiple-response questions, have one column per category that distinguishes between "Selected" (1), "Not selected" (0), and "Not shown" (blank).
See How to Set up an Excel File for Importing Into Displayr for more information about how to best set up your Excel files and the steps to get your data into Displayr.
Method - Use a data collection program
Create a questionnaire in an online data collection program and then enter your data into this as if completing the questionnaire as a respondent. Ideally, make sure you do this using a program that can export an SPSS Data File (.sav).
This approach is generally the best in terms of getting a well-structured data file with rich metadata.
Method - Scanning and OCR
Documents can be scanned, and optical character recognition (OCR) can be used to capture open-ended responses. This process is usually very complex to implement and is inadvisable except with huge studies.