Variable Message appears during skip pattern, closes questionnaire

(I am a complete novice!)

While trying to create skip patterns for my questionnaire (we have role plays set up, and want to have participants choose one person from a group of photos per role play scenario to appear, so since Ps will choose different photos per role play, we need skip patterns to allow us to 'jump' to the role play with the specific photo on it), I have had a difficult time with various errors that completely close me out of MediaLab. For instance, during the above-explained role-play questionnaire, I can only get in so far as viewing one role play (with one photo as a background photo): after this role play scenario ends, instead of moving me along to the [I]next[/I] role play, I get this message:

"The variable v0001 [I](goes up through v0005, twice) [/I]is a string but is stored in the SPSS file as a numeric. It will be connected to a number to match the existing data file. Non-numeric characters may be lost in this process."

I have to 'ok' this many times, and then my running experiment closes. Why would I get this message? I have been careful to write the variable names I would like to skip to correctly in the appropriate 'skip to' cell, and only need to skip over about 10 other item slides (varies: 8-10).

Thank you for your help!

See if this helps... [URL]http://www.empirisoft.com/Support/showthread.php?t=224[/URL]. Also, just in case it's not clear what those variable names are referring to.. For the native SPSS .SAV data file, MediaLab renames variable names that are over 8 characters. If you have any names longer than this (including suffixes added by MediaLab) then they will be renamed VAR0001, VAR0002, etc. In order to find out which variables had to be renamed, you can double click on them in the SPSS .SAV data file. MediaLab saves the origional variable name as the SPSS variable label.

Thank you for the good advice; I'm no longer running into the error.

-Eli