Loading SPSS Survey Data

SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is a tool for statistical analysis of survey data. SuperCHANNEL can import SPSS survey data and convert it to a SuperSTAR database.

The SPSS driver supplied with SuperCHANNEL (spsscmd) can read the SPSS query language (.sps), but not the native SPSS formats (.sav and .por).

Some tools can export directly to .sps, but if this is not the case you will need to convert the data to the SPSS command syntax format before processing with SuperCHANNEL. See Converting SAV and POR Files for more information.

Overview

A survey consists of a set of questions and the corresponding answers for each respondent. Each question will have a fixed set of possible answers.

The survey data must include:

• The questions.
• The allowable answers for each question.
• The survey responses for each question.

The .sps format allows for the survey data to be captured either in a single .sps file (which includes both the question definitions and the responses) or multiple files (with the question definitions in the .sps file and the response in a .dat file).

Learn more about the .sps file format and how it is supported by the SuperCHANNEL driver.

Limitations

The following items are not currently supported by the SuperCHANNEL SPSS driver:

• Automatic creation of hierarchies.
• Date/Time handling.

Additionally, often SPSS creates a new value to substitute nulls and unanswered questions in the dataset. Typically this is stored as the new value -99.99. When this occurs within a metric/measurable field it will skew the data in SuperSTAR as these values will be used as true data points.

Learn More