DATA saved in byquestionnaire format is missing in byvariablename format

[elebel]

There appears to be a glitch whereby certain questionnaire items - which are correctly being saved in the start.csv from the byquestionnaire folder - are not appearing in the start.csv from the byvariablename folder.

I have attached the two files, start_byQuestionnaire.csv and Start_byVariablename.csv, which show this discrepancy. In the start_byQuestionnaire.csv file, notice that all 40 narcissism items (starting at column CG in excel) are properly being saved (narcissism_1,narcissism_2,...,narcissism_40); notice also that the proper values for these 40 items are "1" for the first 20 items and "2" for the last 20 items. However, in the Start_byVariablename.csv file, notice that ONLY the first nine narcissism variables appear (narcissism_1, narcissism_2,...,narcissism_9) and that not all values are "1" (narcissism_3 is incorrectly "2" instead of "1").

I have reproduced this glitch on two independent occasions on two different computers (i'm pretty sure both computer had mediaLab version 2006.1.31). Also, I have ruled out that it might have something to do with having over 255 variable columns, because the data attached to this post has only 175 variables columns in the byquestionnaire format (and only 111 in the byvariablename format).

[jarvis24]

When v2006 first came out there was an increase in the variable name length limit from 7 to 12. In v2006.1.43, this was increased to 60. I'm guessing that's what's going on here given that you were using v2006.1.31 *and* the variable name length increased from 12 to 13 when the problem started to occur in your data. When we bumped the limit up to 60 I believe we also fixed an associated bug that may have been responsible here. Try updating (it's free) to the final release of v2006 (v2006.2.40) or upgrade to v2008 and either of those ought to resolve the issue. Note that the final release of v2006 is still available here: www.empirisoft.com/download_old.aspx.

[elebel]

Thanks for the reply!

Your explanation seems to make some sense, but I still don't understand why the 13-character variables appear in the byquestionnaire .csv file whereas only the 12-character variables appear in the byvariablename .csv file (all within v2006.1.31)?

[jarvis24]

The bug, apparently, was limited to files using the byvariablename data structure.