I don’t often write about what I do in my day-to-day job. But I’ve recently spent quite a bit of time working on survey item non-response and survey abandonment and I want to save you some time if you’re working on those issues, too.
One of the projects on which I’ve worked over the last couple of years is the development of an updated version of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) survey instrument. We’ve done a lot – a LOT – of work on this. As part of this work we’ve pilot tested the draft versions of the new survey. Some of the many things we’ve analyzed in the pilot data are item non-response and survey abandonment. I worked on this last year with the first pilot and when I worked on this again with this year’s pilot I got smarter. Specifically, I wrote an Excel macro that generates the SPSS syntax necessary to analyze item non-response and survey abandonment.
As described in the Excel file, this macro takes a list of survey variable names and creates SPSS syntax that will add several new variables to your SPSS file:
- A “Abandoned” variable indicating the last question the respondent answered if he or she abandoned the survey. If the respondent didn’t abandon the survey, this variable will be left empty (“SYSMIS”).
- For every variable, a “SkippedItem__” variable indicating if the survey item was answered, skipped, or left blank because the survey was abandoned.
- A “SkippedItems” variable indicating the total number of questions the respondent skipped.
- A “SkippedPercentage” variable indicating the percentage of questions the respondent skipped.
- A “AbandonedPercentage” variable indicating the percentage of questions the respondent did not answer because he or she abandoned the survey.
I created this macro because there were several versions of the pilot instrument. Because you have to “work backward” through each question to identify respondents who abandoned the survey, each version of the instrument required a different set of SPSS syntax because each version had a different set of survey questions. So it was much easier for me to write a program that generates the appropriate syntax then to do it by hand multiple times. Laziness is a virtue.
Warning: This macro generates a lot of syntax. The sample input has only four variables but it creates code with 105 lines (including blank lines and comments). The surveys with which I was working had 130-160 variables and I worked with 11 different versions of the survey instrument. In the end, I had an SPSS syntax file with tens of thousands of lines of code. The SPSS syntax editor got very grumpy and slow, probably because of the large number of DO IF conditionals and the syntax highlighting it applies to those blocks of code. I ended up working mostly in Notepad as I was troubleshooting the syntax and pasting the resulting text into the SPSS syntax editor only when I was ready to run it. The good news is that the syntax is actually very straight-forward and arithmetically simple so it ran fairly quickly.
I know that this fills a very, very small niche. But maybe someone will find this helpful or useful. I spent a few days working on this so there’s no reason why someone else should have to redo this work.
Warning 2: I used this macro again a few years later and noticed that it’s set up to only deal with numeric data. If you have any string data then you’ll need to modify it accordingly.
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