Creating metavariables - please can you help?

[Catnap]

Hi all

I really hope someone can help me - stats in not my strong point. I have read and read through my books to no avail.

I conducted some research. A qualitative questionnaire with 62 questions answerable on a scale of 1 - 4 (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree). The questionnaire was made up of 5 different headings.

I have input my data in to SPSS and have reversed scored the questions that need it.

Now I want to create metavariables to reflect the 5 different headings (ie the first 7 questions concerned following procedures) so I can find the meatavariable means and sd's.

Please can someone help me as I am pulling my hair out! Its for my MSc which I have done well on all the modules apart from stats!

I have SPSS 16.

Thank you!

Best wishes

Claire

[Fierce]

You want to all values in a single variable or you want a new variable with the same number of cases?
For the first option, look under DATA>RESTRUCTUR>RESTRUCTURE VARIABLES INTO CASES. For the second, TRANSFORM>COMPUTE VARIABLE and use the MEAN(<VAR1>,<VAR2>,...) function to compute a variable cointainig means of the ones you want.