Question

what does the operation "recode into different variables" do to data in spss

Answer 1

Recode into different variables in SPSS allows us to create a new variable based on an existing variable by reassigning the values of existing variables into new values for a new variable. That is, the changes do not overwrite the original variable however they are instead applied to a copy of the original variable under a new name.

You can do two operations using Recode into different variables in SPSS:

• Recode Old Values Into New Values - Example if we have a dataset for the records of employees in XYZ Company and it has a variable department with values - Accounts, HR, IT and Sales. And Suppose we want to recode these values as 1, 2, 3 and 4 i.e  Accounts - 1 , HR - 2, IT - 3 and Sales - 4, so we use Recode Old Values Into New Values under a new variable called DepartmentIndicator.

• Recoding using If cases- Sometimes if we wish to recode values for a given variable only when certain conditions in the dataset are satisfied i.e only those cases which meets a specified criteria will be recoded, and cases not meeting the creteria will be assigned a missing value.

Example - Suppose the same dataset for company XYZ has a variable for Salary of employees and we want to give bonus to those employees with Salary greater than $10000 per annum so we will use IF Option to specify Condition for Salary > $10000 and create an Indicator named BonusIndicator taking values 1 if salary is greater than $10000 and 0 ,otherwise.