Cleaning/relabeling categories
Labels are applied to categories so you know what the answer options are (eg: Male/Female).
The metadata on labels may be "messy" (for example, questionnaire or HTML code contaminates the labels in an SPSS datafile or is carried over into the subvariable labels on categorical array).
In the web app
- You can change labels in the Variable Properties
Crunch Automation
Note: there are are number of specific Crunch Automation functions that are especially useful in cleaning categories. See the landing page for Crunch Automation for details:
-
- COPY(field_name)
- KEEP_AFTER(field_name, separator)
- KEEP_BEFORE(field_name, separator)
- KEEP_BETWEEN(field_name, start_separator, end_separator)
- PREFIX(field_name, prefix)
- REGEX_REPLACE(field_name, match, replacement)
- REMOVE_COMMON_PREFIX(field_name)
- REMOVE_COMMON_SUFFIX(field_name)
- SUFFIX(field_name, suffix)
Note: for the Append process, it is critical to run LABEL CATEGORIES on the new wave of data before Append, since Crunch does a match on category labels and not category id's (See Definitive Guide to Tracking).