Need Help with Multiple Response Question

[narcissus105]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to analyze a multiple response question and obtain results per respondent? For example a question like this:
Which sports do you play? (please select all applicable options)
1. Tennis
2. Basketball
3. Swimming
4. Soccer

So each respondent can choose all options or no options or different combinations. So how can you use SPSS to see say respondent 1 chose tennis and basketball, instead of only seeing how many people ticked each response separately? Been trying to figure this out for like 3 hours now so if anyone knows it would be greatly appreciated. Thankssss

[Berley]

Off the top of my head, I would say you would need to code the response to that question either as 4 different variables (each option being a separate variable with a yes/no response) OR code it as a single variable with all possible combinations. So 0-4 are predetermined as above. 5 might be tennis and basketball. 6 might be tennis and swimming. 7 would be tennis and soccer. 8 would be tennis, basketball, and swimming. 9 would be tennis, basketball, and soccer. 10 might be basketball and swimming. 11 would be basketball and soccer. Etc. Depending on how you're going to use the data, one approach might be better than the other.

[narcissus105]

Hey thanks so much for the response. I did what you said and I have the question coded with each variable separately the issue with this is that you cannot see what each respondent ticked individually say both tennis and swimming or tennis and basketball. The question with the sports here is just a simple example my actual question has 20 responses that can be ticked (check all that apply) and having all possible combinations as separate variables is a bit impossible. Is there any other way to do that or is it possible at all?

[helicon]

This type of problem is typically handled by doing what was suggested above, coding each possible response dichotomously (0 for no, 1 for yes), then using a base 10 approach to generate a unique code for each possible combination, i.e.:

compute sportcombo = (tennis*1) + (basketball*10) + (swimming*10**2) + (soccer*10**3) + ....... (sport20*10**18).

Obviously if you have 20 sports there's a very large number of possible combinations and the code will be up to 20 digits in length (recent versions of SPSS should be able handle this though). You could also use base 2, i.e:

compute sportcombo = (tennis*1) + (basketball*2) + (swimming*2**2) + (soccer*2**3) + ......(sport20*2**18).

which will result in a codes of shorter length but which will be harder to read at a glance.

Depending on the size of your dataset you'll find that some combinations are far more common than others and most probably won't exist at all. Run a frequencies on the sportcombo variable and begin labelling your combinations.

[narcissus105]

Thanks I will try this