How to Combine Categories Across Multiple Variable Sets

This article describes how to combine the same groups of categories in multiple variable sets at once. There are many uses for this feature. You may want to do this to merge scores into top, middle, and bottom box categories for single-response questions in your survey data. This example, groups Net Promotor Scores (NPS) into their appropriate Detractor, Passive, Promoter groups. 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:

Requirements

Nominal and Ordinal variables and those - Multi variable sets which share the same category values.

Method

In the Data Sources tree, select all the variable sets with shared categories you wish to modify.
From the toolbar menu, select Anything > Data > Variables > Modify > 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.