Statistics

Kate Crowe, Sarah Masso, Graham Daniel and I spent last week in Sydney at the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc (ACSPRI) winter school undertaking statistics courses. Attendance at the course was supported by the Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network. The knowledge we gained will be useful to ensure that our data entry, coding, and analysis is accurate, efficient, and effective.

Our simplest (but one of the most effective) syntax that we created within SPSS was:
COMPUTE Age=DATEDIFF(DateScreen,DOB,"months").
EXECUTE.

This code meant that the SPSS program could automatically create the child's age in months from the date of birth (DOB) and the date of screening (DateScreen). We also created syntax to code all of Australia's postcodes into deciles relating to advantage/disadvantage, and all of Australia's languages.

Graham Daniel, Kate Crowe, Sarah Masso, and Sharynne McLeod at ACSPRI in Sydney