SPSS® 12.0 Command Syntax Reference

164 AUTORECODE
Example
Example
DATA LIST / COMPANY 1-21 (A) SALES 24-28.
BEGIN DATA
CATFOOD JOY 10000
OLD FASHIONED CATFOOD 11200
. . .
PRIME CATFOOD 10900
CHOICE CATFOOD 14600
END DATA.
AUTORECODE VARIABLES=COMPANY /INTO=RCOMPANY /PRINT.
TABLES TABLE = SALES BY RCOMPANY
/TTITLE=’CATFOOD SALES BY COMPANY’.
• Because TABLES truncates string variables to eight characters, AUTORECODE is used to
recode the string variable COMPANY, which contains the names of various hypothetical
cat food companies.
• AUTORECODE recodes COMPANY into a numeric variable RCOMPANY. Values of
RCOMPANY are consecutive integers beginning with 1 and ending with the number of
different values entered for COMPANY. The values of COMPANY are used as value
labels for RCOMPANY’s numeric values. The PRINT subcommand displays a table of
the original and recoded values.
• The variable RCOMPANY is used as the banner variable in the TABLES procedure to
produce a table of sales figures for each cat food company. The value labels for
RCOMPANY are used as column headings. Since TABLES does not truncate value labels,
the full company names appear.
AUTORECODE VARIABLES=REGION /INTO=RREGION /PRINT.
ANOVA Y BY RREGION (1,5).
• In statistical procedures, empty cells can reduce performance and increase memory
requirements. In this example, assume that the factor REGION has only five nonempty
categories, represented by the numeric codes 1, 4, 6, 14, and 20. AUTORECODE recodes
those values into 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for target variable RREGION.
• The variable RREGION is used in ANOVA. If the original variable REGION were used, the
amount of memory required by ANOVA would be 4429 bytes. Using variable RREGION,
ANOVA requires only 449 bytes of memory.