Scenario and question:
Basically I have results for a matched pair survey of couples in SPSS. It's set up where the person A's answers to questions 1-10 are the first 10 variables and then person B's answers to questions 1-10 are the next 10 variables. But I need to run tests and produce crosstabs for individuals, so if I have 20 couples the crosstabs outputs should be out of 40. I was able to simply select all the data for the "person B"s in couples and just copy and paste it over, however I lost couple-specific data and I still need to be able to create new variables based on the matched pair information. My way around this was creating a new variable while still in matched pair form called CoupleNum, so even when they were in individual form I could say if their couple number equaled each other calculate this or that. But I don't actually know how to do this. In the same dataset, how do I compare rows for the same variable?
Example for what I'm talking about:
Here's fake data
| A_CoupleNum | A1_HappyScale | B_CoupleNum | B1_HappyScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | 1 | 4 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 9 | 3 | 7 |
I'd move it to individual form like
| CoupleNum | HappyScale |
|---|---|
| 1 | 6 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 9 |
| 1 | 4 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 7 |
And then I'd want to be able to make a new variable called CoupleHappiness that was the HappyScale for each person in the couple added together.
| CoupleNum | HappyScale | CoupleHappiness |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | 10 |
| 2 | 2 | 5 |
| 3 | 9 | 16 |
| 1 | 4 | 10 |
| 2 | 3 | 5 |
| 3 | 7 | 16 |
So essentially I'd want to code something like
if CoupleNum = CoupleNum CoupleHappiness = HappyScale + HappyScale
I know this is definitely not correct but hopefully it gets my point across and what I'd like to do.
Potential solutions I've found that don't work/I don't know how to make them work for my needs:
Since I'm new to SPSS, I've found several things that might work but I don't know SPSS syntax well enough to suit them for my needs. I've noticed people mention things like LAG functions or CREATE + LEAD if they were in adjacent rows, but they could be all over the place. Someone also mentioned using case numbers but I don't exactly understand that.
Sorry this was a really long question but I would appreciate any help!!