spss and dividing a sample along the median

[Gabriela Fernandes]

hi,

this is my first post to this group.
I would like to divide my sample of participants into two groups along the
median. I found how to compute the median value but I can't find how to tell
spss to divide the group into two parts along this median value (though I
studied the program's help).
Does anyone know the menu commands for this operation or is it something
"manual" I have to do?
Any help would be appreciated.

regards,
gabriela

[Raynald Levesque]

Hi Gabriela!

The following code automatically splits a file into 2 groups along the
median.

GET FILE='C:\Program Files\SPSS\employee data.sav'.
RANK
VARIABLES=salary (A) /RANK /PERCENT INTO pctest /TIES=MEAN .
COMPUTE group1=pctest<50.
FREQ VAR=group1.

HTH

Raynald Levesque rlev...@videotron.ca
Visit My SPSS Pages: http://pages.infinit.net/rlevesqu/

[Frederic Villamayor]

One way is to use RANK command:

RANK VARIABLES=yourvar (A) /NTILES (2) /PRINT=YES .

You can find it at the menu Transform>Assign Ranks to cases... You should
choose Rank types>Ntiles and type '2' as the number of Ntiles you want.
Continue and accept all, and the program will create a new variable that
will assign every case to the first 2tile (50% below the median) or to the
second 2tile (50% above the median). Just one problem: to decide what to do
with values that arre exactly equal to the median. By default, SPSS assigns
them to the 2nd 2tile...

HTH

Frederic