Hi there,

I hope you can help me because I'm not sure if the issue is SPSS or LimeSurvey.

Once I export the data to SPSS, my data shows up as A1, or A2, or A3 etc. and when I try to add these to get the total value for a scale, I cannot because they alphanumeric rather than just numeric. So I went back to my questionnaire on LimeSurvey and changed the code for each response choice to 1, or 2, or 3 etc. but when I then export back to SPSS, no data appears, there are simply dots where the A1, or A2, or A3 etc. used to be.

I might be missing something really simple - how do I get the LimeSurvey responses to translate into usable data in SPSS?

Many thanks,
Dani.

I would modify the data in SPSS or in the syntax when importing the data into SPSS.
Some LS-Versions are not generating a 100% accurate syntax import file.

Thank you very much for your reply. Modify how?

www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/faq/stringnum.htm
www.spss-tutorials.com/spss-alter-type-command/

That's great, thank you so much for your help.

I'm not so good with that language but found this helpful video, just in case others read this post www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jie942kG50w

With SPSS I ran into the problem that it had trouble importing textual answers. For that I now use PSPP, the open source variant of SPSS and I add an extra command/filter to the syntax file: /ESCAPE which escapes the comma's that are in textual answers sometimes.

I also saw that in several LS versions the syntax is not completely right. We tried to do something about it and we made some software efforts through pull requests at the LimeSurvey Github, but still it is not completely right. When importing large textual answers, it may be needed to change the A (Alphanumeric) code from A1 to A1000 of even higher to import textual answers up to 1000 characters.

www.gnu.org/software/pspp/

I have seen the thread in GIT. Is there a relating bug ticket in mantis?
The maximum length of text answers is often wrong. The limit is set too low. The code which tries to calculate the maximum length of all answer entries seems to be buggy.