Did most people only select 1 option, or did most people tend to select 2 or 3 options? How do we count the number of nonmissing responses a person gave?Īdditionally, we may want to know how many options respondents tended to select. It stands to reason that a person who did not answer the question must have missing values on all variables in the response set. This person clearly answered the question, despite having "missing values" on some of the variables in the set. For example, someone who responds that they own a phone will still have missing values for laptop and tablet and other. That approach will not work with multiple-response questions, because the answers are spread across multiple variables, and can be selected independently. This task is not as straightforward as it is with single-choice multiple-choice questions, where we can simply count the number of missing values in a single column.
For example, we could restructure this question into a series of single-choice, "Yes or No" questions: However, this is not the case for multiple response questions: each checkbox functions like a "Yes or No" question. On its surface, it looks similar to "single-choice" multiple choice questions, which can be summarized using (univariate) frequency tables. This particular question type is deceptively simple. Selects "phone" and "other" types "mp3 player" in the write-in box
We might create a survey question like this one:Īs individual users complete the survey, their selections might look like this: For example, suppose we are interested in surveying a group about what types of electronic devices they own, and suppose we are especially interested in the three most common types of mobile computing devices: laptops, phones, and tablets. In this tutorial, we will focus on a specific type of multiple response set: multiple response (or "check-all-that-apply") questionnaire items.Ī multiple response question presents a list of possible answer options, and the respondent selects all options that are true for them.
Multiple response sets occur when you have a set of related choices or characteristics in which a subject or experimental unit can possess one or more of those characteristics. Example: Multiple Response Frequency Tables.Defining Multiple Response Sets in SPSS.
Counting the Number of Selected Options using Count Values Within Cases.Introduction: About Multiple Response Set Variables.
This tutorial is a primer on how to work with data from multiple choice, multiple-response (or "check all that apply") questions in SPSS Statistics.