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Location of Robbery

South Carolina Department of Public Safety

Download SPSS syntax
Download Table Template file

This example looks at robbery locations.  This chart was created by grouping choosing the most frequent locations of robberies, combining commercial locations into one category.  All robbery offenses were then selected and a cross-tabulation table was created.  When using this code, be sure to insert the path and the file name of the data file to be used, as well as the directory and file name for saving.  If you need any assistance working with the syntax provided, please contact us.

NOTE: This example requires that you download a template file before running the syntax.

The assumptions for the following example of code are:
  1. The data file was created as described in "Reading A Multi-Level Data File."
  2. An aggregated flat file was created as described in "Creating An Incident-Level Aggregated Flat File in SPSS"; and
  3. The individual data segments were saved in separate files as described in "Creating An Incident-Level Aggregated Flat File in SPSS".
Preparing the File.  The unit of analysis for this research question is incident.  The incident-level flat file can be used rather than multiple segments (administrative, victim, offense) because the variables needed were created with the aggregate command in the Creating An Incident-Level Aggregated Flat File procedure (see above).  The SELECT IF chooses all robbery incidents and saves them into a new file, Robbery 1999.sav.

GET FILE='Directory\Path\Incident 1999.sav'.
SELECT IF (rob ge 1).
SAVE OUTFILE='Directory\Path\Robbery 1999.sav'.

The RECODE groups the values for the variable incident location into four numeric categories and names the new variable 'location'.   VALUE LABELS assigns a descriptive label to each numerical value for the variable 'location'.

GET FILE='Directory\Path\Robbery 1999.sav'.
RECODE inc_loc
  (13,18 = 1)(2,3,5,8,9,12,14,17,21 = 2)(20 = 3)(7,23,24 = 4)(else = 5)INTO location.
VARIABLE LABELS location 'Location'.
VALUE LABELS location
1 'Road/Hwy/Parking Garage'  2 'Commercial'  3 'Residences'  4 'Service/Conv Store'  5 'Other'.

Creating the Output.  This output is defined as a simple bar graph that displays the percentage of robberies by location.  The TEMPORARY VARIABLE LABELS nullifies the variable label for the graph and for variable location.  We also use a previously defined template for formatting the chart.

TEMPORARY.
VARIABLE LABELS location ' '.
GRAPH
  /BAR(SIMPLE)=PCT BY location
  /MISSING=REPORT
  /TEMPLATE='Directory\Path\Table8 template.sct'
  /TITLE='Robberies by Location'.

The resulting bar graph looks like this:

location_robberies_sc.jpg (38960 bytes)