Microsoft Word research method fm doc

 

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Research methodology 
118
 

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Research methodology 
119
 

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Research methodology 
120
Decimals 
indicates the number of decimal places to be shown
. Click on in the first cell of the fourth column 
. Type 0 in this cell, or click on the down arrow twice to reduce the number shown to 0
Before continuing examine the range of data types that are available. Clicking on 
any cell in the
Type column and then clicking on the … symbol will show them.
The Comma, Dot and Scientific Notation options provide for numeric data in different formats. 
The Date option allows calendar dates to be entered e.g. 24-05-95. The Dollar and Custom 
currency options provide for currency data e.g. £24.99. The String option is often used to put 
in comments for each observation; for instance you may wish to record the doctor who saw 
each patient and enter ‘Dr Smith’ or ‘Dr Jones’ as text. The default data format is numeric and 
most data is best entered in this format, using numeric codes. The use of other codes may 
restrict the statistical techniques available: for example none of the statistical options at all 
work with data in string format.
 
4. Missing values 
SPSS is good at handling missing data; there are essentially two options for doing so:
 
Option 1: System-defined missing values 
The system-defined value for missing data in SPSS is ‘.’. Missing values imported from other 
software appear on the worksheet as ‘.’, and you can input missing values by entering the 
full-stop (without quotes) manually.
These missing values are not included in the analysis and SPSS gives a useful summary of 
missing values and numbers of patients included (the ‘case processing summary’) as part of 
the output for all analyses.
However, you may wish to include missing values in some analyses, and it is also good 
practice to record reasons for missing values if these are known. In this case option 2 is 
preferable: