UPCOMING WEBINAR: Cluster analysis: Classic, powerful, and still worth knowing This article describes how to manually enter data so it is usable as a data set for Displayr.
Requirements
Either a spreadsheet, 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).
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) used to capture open-ended responses. This process is usually very complex to implement and is inadvisable except with huge studies.