Expands the Capabilities of SPSS and Excel 

Program Dynamic

Dummy variables are often used in regression analysis to represent categorical variables.  ZumaStat has a routine that makes it simple to convert a single variable into a set of dummy variables.

In this program, the user is shown on the left side of the dialog box the variables that are in the SPSS active data file (see the example below).  Note the 'Sort' and 'Label' buttons below the listbox.  The 'Labels' button is a toggle switch that allows the user to see the labels associated with the variables or to not see the labels.  In this example, the labels are not shown.  The 'Sort' button is a toggle switch that allows the user to sort the variable list by file order or alphabetically by variable name.  The actions produced by these buttons are instantaneous.

The user chooses the variable that s/he wants to convert to dummy variables.  In the example below, the variable 'grade' contains a student's grade in school (scored as 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11) and the researcher wants to create dummy variables with dummy coding to represent grade. 

The user indicates the lowest score and the highest score and the increment unit.  From this information, ZumaStat will add the appropriate dummy variables to the end of the active data file.  The new variables have labels attached to them that make explicit what they represent.  For the current example, a dummy variable will be created where all students in grade 7 have a 1 and everyone else has a zero (with missing data still being reflected as missing), a dummy variable will be created where all students in grade 8 have a 1 and everyone else has a zero, a dummy variable will be created where all students in grade 9 have a 1 and everyone else has a zero, a dummy variable will be created where all students in grade 10 have a 1 and everyone else has a zero, and a dummy variable will be created where all students in grade 11 have a 1 and everyone else has a zero, 

This is a very quick method for creating dummy variables.  ZumaStat also offers a utility for creating dummy variables but using effect coding rather than dummy coding.

You can use ZumaStat's renaming utility to rename the dummy variables easily.

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