From the course: SPSS: Data Visualizing and Data Wrangling

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Creating dummy variables

Creating dummy variables

From the course: SPSS: Data Visualizing and Data Wrangling

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Creating dummy variables

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- [Instructor] Data is really a lot more flexible than people assume, and ideas like there are quantitative variables and qualitative variables or categories and scales are actually a little more flexible, and one place where this shows up is the use of indicator variables or often called dummy variables. I don't like that term. I don't know what it means. I think it refers to a stand-in like a showroom dummy, but I call them dummy variables because that's what SPSS calls them, but I like to think of them as indicator variables. These are 0/1 variables that indicate whether a score is in a particular category, and they can be used to take something that might be text-based and turn it into this numerical variable that can then be used in T-tests and correlations and regressions, and actually gives you a lot more flexibility than you might originally think that you had. For example, what I'm going to show you here in the sample dataset is it will take this one variable here, psy_reg…

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