Showing syntax in the SPSS output.

When you have a lot of SPSS output, it's not always clear how you got the output. Showing syntax in the output can help. Syntax is the programming statements that correspond to the menu choices that you make. Like any programming language, it is somewhat cryptic. Still, with a little bit of effort, you can decipher enough of it to help you remember what you did.

To show syntax in the output, select EDIT | OPTIONS from the menu and click on the VIEWER tab.

Click on the DISPLAY COMMANDS IN THE LOG check box in the lower left hand corner. Then click on the OK button.

Here's an example of what the syntax might look like. In a study of breast feeding mothers, we excluded any mothers less than 18 years old, and then computed the average duration of breast feeding. Here's what the output window would look like.

Without the syntax, you might forget why you only have 78 mothers rather than 84 mothers in descriptive statistics. But if you look up above you'll see the phrase mom_age >= 18 listed a couple of times in the syntax. This reminds us that we removed the 6 mothers who were less than 18 years old.

This webpage was written by Steve Simon on 2003-06-13, edited by Steve Simon, and was last modified on 2008-07-08. Send feedback to ssimon at cmh dot edu or click on the email link at the top of the page.