Christine wrote: I have been asked to set up a database for a questionnaire that has already been written. I was going to set it up in epidata but my problem is how to deal witha question that asks people to rank options. The question gives a list of topics and asks the person filling in the questionnaire to rank them from 1-10 in order of importance.
I suggest to do the following: For each question (say 25 different themes) enter the priority the person gave to that issue. setup the qes: v1 item1 ..... ## v2 item2 ..... ## etc v25 text for item 25 ##
in chk make the defaultvalue 0: before file DEFAULTVALUE v1-v25 0 end
Then in analysis after entering the data: (say you had the 25 variables) read response aggregate /sum="v1,v2,v3,v4,v5" aggregate /sum="v6,v7,v8,v9,v10" etc
* the tables will show the sum of the variables, that is the overall ranking sum.
example read bromar // example data set for epidata aggregate /sum="dectime,km,age" which gives the output: N Ndectime SUMdecti1 Nkm SUMkm Nage SUMage 4027 3556 13913.85 3620 381084.00 3786 153740
telling us: 4027 observations in all of these 3556 contributed to dectime, 3620 to km and 3786 to age variables. Sum of the three being 13913.85, 381084.00 and 153740
Obviously here the sum makes no sense, but in your case the sum of the ranking would reflect all of the variables and the responses.
regards Jens Lauritsen EpiData Association ps. I tried to locate the user sending spam to the list today/yesterday and may effectively have deleted this person from the list (if not we will see more of the same spam) - terribly annoying.