How to Combine Specific Categories on Multiple Variable Sets at Once

Sometimes you may have a bunch of variables whose values are coded the same, and you want to modify all of them to create multiple new categories at once. This happens a lot when you ask a rating question across multiple brands/products in a survey. You may want to merge scores into top, middle, and bottom box categories (rather than running those specific features one at a time). However scaled categories are not a requirement, and you can manually pick the specific categories to combine into each new category. This article describes how to use the Modify Variable Sets > Scale (Custom) feature to combine the same groups of categories in multiple variable sets at once. The example covered below groups Net Promoter Scores (NPS) into their appropriate Detractor, Passive, and Promoter groups. So you can go from many NPS tables that look like this:

to tables/variables that group those scores into Detractors, Passives, and Promoters all at once:

If instead, you want to create a single variable set with categories representing all combinations of categories across two or more variable sets, such as age and gender, see How to Create Categories From All Combinations of Responses Across Variables.

Requirements

Nominal and Ordinal variables and those - Multi variable sets which share the same category values. If your variable is structured as Numeric, then you can Duplicate the variable and change the Structure > Nominal to use this function on the number values.

Method

In the Data Sources tree, select all the variable sets that have the same code frame (values and value labels) you wish to modify.
From the object inspector , select Modify Variable Sets > Combine Categories > Scale (Custom).
If any Don't Know style categories can be found in the selected variable sets, you have the option of selecting Yes to remove them from your variable sets, otherwise, select No.
In the next prompt, select the categories you wish to merge for the first combined category and press OK. Here, we will select 0 to 6.
Enter the label of this combined category and press OK. Here, we will enter "Detractors".
The script will continue to loop through the previous two steps while there are remaining categories in the variable sets or you press OK without selecting any categories to end the combining process. In this example, we will select categories 7 and 8 and set the label as "Passives", and then categories 9 and 10 and set as "Promoters".
The selected variable sets will now be updated to include these combined categories.