Taming SPSS: Large Scale and Secure Data Entry with LimeSurvey Sidney Shapiro, Rural and Northern Health and Kirk Unger, Forensic Science Supervisor: Dr. Wayne Warry

The Problem Entering thousands (or millions) or records into SPSS takes an enormous amount of time and resources Data entry errors

A screenshot of spss http://screenshots. en. sftcdn

The Project Study conducted in 2014 Chart review of 450 patients in a practice for all of 2012 Collected all prescriptions, dosages, demographic information Over 1.4 million fields (data points)

The Method Data was qualitative and not easy to extract from the electronic medical records (EMR) system This required a large amount of manual labour Needed to find an easier alternate data entry system to manually enter records

LimeSurvey Local installation The Solution WAMP Encryption (BitLocker) LimeSurvey Local installation

The Solution We set up a password protected computer (which does not require internet access) with a local installation of WAMP server (PHP, Apache, and MySQL). We installed a local LimeSurvey database running on Apache (web) and MySQL (database) All of the files and database are held in an encrypted virtual drive, which is relocked following a data entry session

Issues There is a limit to the number of data points that can be collected per record (4086 data fields per entry) We divided the year into two halves and had two separate surveys Each survey contained the random number assigned to the cases, and data was collected by checking boxes, radio buttons, or tying in numbers Fields with no response were automatically filled in

Putting it all into SPSS The survey were then exported into SPSS for analysis

Advantages Secure Speeds data entry Ease of use Can be run offline Multiple layers of security and encryption Speeds data entry Quickly fills in negative data for unchecked options Ease of use One set up, the system is simple to load and use with any web browser

THANK YOU!