Conclusion

The material presented in this chapter has prepared you to input most types of data commonly encountered in social science research. Even when the data have been entered successfully, however, they are not necessarily ready to be analyzed. Perhaps you have inputted raw data, and need to transform the data in some way before they can be analyzed.

This is often the case with questionnaire data, as responses to multiple questions are often summed or averaged to create new variables to be analyzed. Or perhaps you have data from a large, heterogeneous sample and you want to perform analyses on only a subgroup of that sample (e.g., female, but not male, respondents). In these situations, some form of data manipulation or data subsetting is required. The following chapter shows how to do this.