SPSS® 12.0 Command Syntax Reference

1706 Appendix C
Figure C.4 NESTED.DAT file with missing records
Y 1988
P JONES 900
P GREGORY 400
R BATON ROUGE
P RODRIGUEZ 300
P SMITH 333
P GRAU 100
• The order of RECORD TYPE statements defines the hierarchical relationship among
the records. The first RECORD TYPE defines the highest-level record type. The next
RECORD TYPE defines the next highest level, and so forth. The last RECORD TYPE
defines a case in the working data file.
• END FILE TYPE signals the end of file definition.
• In processing nested data, the program reads each record type you define. Information
on the highest and intermediate-level records is spread to cases to which the information
applies. The output from the LIST command is identical to that in Figure C.2.
Nested Files with Missing Records
In a nested file, some cases may be missing one or more record types defined in
RECORD TYPE commands. For example, in Figure C.4 the region record for salespersons
Jones and Gregory is missing.
The program assigns missing values to variables that are not present for a case. Using
the modified NESTED.DAT file in Figure C.4, the commands in the previous example
produce the output shown in Figure C.5. You can see that the program assigned missing
values to REGION for Jones and Gregory.
Figure C.5 LIST output for nested data with missing records
YEAR REGION SALESPER SALES
1988 JONES 900
1988 GREGORY 400
1988 BATON ROUGE RODRIGUEZ 300
1988 BATON ROUGE SMITH 333
1988 BATON ROUGE GRAU 100
You may want to examine cases with missing records, since these cases may indicate
data errors. If you add the MISSING=WARN subcommand to your FILE TYPE command,
the program prints a warning message when a case is missing a defined record type. For
example, the program would print two warnings when processing data in Figure C.4.
When MISSING is set to WARN, cases are built in the same way as when the default
setting (NOWARN) is in effect.