SPSS .sav data is missing new variables?

[Sonia]

Hi, I've set up my study and all is running smoothly, EXCEPT for some reason medialab is not recording my participants' responses to the message recall items or to a second thought-listing task. both are marked to record text, so i'm not sure what's going on, expecially since everything else is running so smoothly. any thoughts or suggestions to help figure this out would be MUCH appreciated!

thanks,
Sonia

p.s. i've attached a sample questionnaire so that you can see what i am talking about -- the issue is with items #56 and #170. thanks!

[jarvis24]

Hi Sonia,

Did you add the items after some initial test runs? And are you looking at the SPSS .sav data file? If so, remember that the .sav file can not have variables added to it after it has been created. So if you add items, try clearing out your data folder and then run a test session. If this is the problem, you should now find that everything is writing OK. This same problem creates trouble for .csv and .txt dat files but only in so far as the data won't match the origional file headers.

Bottom line is that if you've made some changes to your experiment structure, try clearing your data folder and doing a fresh run. If that doesn't fix it, please let me know.

-Blair

[Sonia]

Blair,
I've deleted the data folder and that worked to fix the initial problem (so now all my responses are being recorded!); however, i want the thought-listing and message-recall string items to record more that 50 characters, but i don't know how to change this so that it records it properly to the SPSS.sav file (since when I change the SPSS file to increase the number of characters recorded it no longer records those items). Any other place i can change the # of characters recorded (and the variable names to be listed in SPSS)?

thanks!
Sonia

[jarvis24]

The text responses in the automatically generated SPSS .sav file are truncated at 50 characters. The full text values are available in the other data file formats (e.g., .csv., .txt). If you use the SPSS syntax to manually read in the .txt data, you can change the default A50 values to A255 or however many characters you would like SPSS to use before truncating.

[Rene Kopietz]

Hi Blair,

we have basically the same problem. We record string variables (Ss generate descriptions of a target person), but they are truncuated. However, when I try to modify (or even attempt to use the syntax file without modifying it) nothig happens (or I get error messages). This happens for a long time now (using different ML versions as well as SPSS versions). I just tried to switch the language in the regional settings, but it does not work either.

SPSS Error message:

>Error # 4135 in column 13. Text: 1
>You must not specify the column location for variables read in FREE or LIST
>format.
>This command not executed.

The only thing I changed was the path.

Thx in advance,
Rene

[jarvis24]

Can you send me or post the syntax and a sample data file? I'll try to have SPSS read it here and see if I can tell what's wrong.