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Follow-Through on Statistics Lectures:
Summaries and Questions

  1. Variables, Variable Labels, and Values, Value Labels

    2. In Bales' classic Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) research showed that asking thoughtful questions was as indicative of leadership in small face-to-face groups as was summarizing the group's efforts to a given point to refocus the discussion.

    Bales' work came to mind as a read Juan's e-mail Wednesday morning:

    On Wednesday, September 27, 2000, Juan Mejia wrote:

    My name is Juan Mejia, and I am in your Stats Class. I had a question regarding the class discussion last night. I understood that in the stats program you cannot input the name of the whole variable so we must use some sort of an abbreviation, or label. I also understood that for every choice in the survey question we must use numbers, or code numbers. My question: is: what makes up the whole code book, or is there more to it? Is the code book more complex than that or or is it simply the code numbers and labels?

    Also regarding variables:

    Indepedent and Dependent: If I said that the higher the education a person has, the higher the reading level . . . Is it true that the idepedent variable is Education and the dependent variable is the person's reading level? And could these two variables be described as cause and effect?

    Juan Carlos Mejia
    Statistics Class

    On September 27, jeanne responded:

    Good questions, Juan. The codebook in a professional research study gives the variable names and the variable labels (the short names by which the variables appear in your working tables, such as CAPPUN for "capital punishment." The variable's name is "capital punisment." But in working tables in programs like SPSS, you will see CAPPUN.

    The codebook also gives value labels. Values are the different categories or actual numbers that the variable was allowed to vary over. For example, for the variable, income: the researcher may have asked respondents to choose between high, medium, and low. "High," "medium," "low" are the value labels, that we want printed in our table margins, so that people can make sense of the table.. The working tables will use the code numbers. For example, the research may assign a 1 to "high," a 2 to "medium," and a 3 to "low." These numbers are called "code numbers."

    The codebook provides this information so that the computer can work with numbers and on/off switches, and we can work with the labels.

    More later . . . jeanne