How to Combine Categories Across Multiple Variable Sets

This article describes how to combine the same sets of categories in multiple single-response questions and single-response grids that share the same categories.

For example, if you have a battery of many Net promoter score (NPS) questions, such as the below...

... you are able to convert the 11-point scale for all these variables into Detractors, Passives and Promoters all at once:

Requirements

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

Method

In the Data Sets 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. 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.