Documentation and Help GAP Toolkit 5 Training in basic drug abuse data management and analysis Training session 13

Objectives To establish the importance to professional research of thorough documentation To describe the SPSS facilities for documentation To describe the range of Help facilities available in SPSS

Documentation Data diary SPSS syntax SPSS Journal Code book

SPSS Journal Maintains a record of the syntax of all commands entered during a session Edit/Options/General

The code book Question-wording (the questionnaire) Location of the variables in the file (not important if only using SPSS, but important if exporting data) Variable names Value labels Missing values

Utilities Utilities/Variables: provides a list of the variables and their definitions; this option is used when working in SPSS Utilities/File Info prints the variable definitions to the Output Viewer

Utilities/Variables

Utilities/File Info

SPSS Help

Help facilities Help/Topics Help/Tutorial Help/SPSS Homepage Help/Syntax Guide Help/Statistics Coach Right click in dialogue boxes for guidance on using particular features Right click on output in the Viewer Window for the Results Coach

Help/Topics Help/Topics offers three options: Contents Index Find –Contents provides access to general categories –Index offers a full keyword listing and search facility of all topics covered –Find provides a more detailed search of the Help database

Help/SPSS tutorial Help/Tutorial generates the SPSS tutorial The tutorial covers the basic facilities in SPSS, providing step-by-step tuition References to relevant SPSS tutorials are located in the notes for the Summary page of the course sessions

Navigation keys

Help/SPSS home page If your computer is linked to the Internet, this option will open up the SPSS home page in your Internet browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, and so forth) The home page has some useful downloads and Help facilities and provides information about the SPSS company

Help/Syntax Guide The Syntax Guide is a large Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf) Adobe Acrobat must be loaded on your machine to use the Guide The index appears on the left-hand side, the contents on the right It is useful if you start using syntax rather than menu commands

Help/Statistics Coach The Statistics Coach is intended to provide help in selecting appropriate statistical techniques The user is asked a series of questions relating to the task they wish to perform and the nature of the data On the basis of the answers, a suitable statistical procedure is selected and help given on its use

Navigation keys Additional examples The question The options

The question The options

Context-sensitive Help Dialogue Box Help The Results Coach

Summary Data diary Syntax Spss.jnl Code book Utilities/Variables Utilities/File Info Help/Topics Help/Tutorial Help/SPSS home page Help/Syntax Guide Help/Statistics Coach Dialogue box Help Results Coach