Obviously, it is possible to build much more complex expressions than this simple test of equivalence. You can see here we’ve got “Sex = 0”, which tells SPSS that it should only select cases where the value of the variable Sex is 0 (Female = 0, Male = 1). The idea here is to construct an expression in the text box at the top that functions to select cases. This is where you do the work of selecting female only cases. The Select Cases: If dialog box will appear. Once you’ve selected it, you need to click on the If… button (as above). We’re going to focus on the “If condition is satisfied” option, which you should select. This provides a number of different options for selecting cases. This will bring up the the Select Cases dialog box. This is where the select cases functionality comes in useful. The question is how do we select only female cases, thereby excluding males from any tests that we run? Select Cases But the trouble is our sample contains data for both males and females, and any tests we run will be on that basis. We want to compare this to the average time for women in our sample. Imagine we already know that in the population as a whole the average amount of time it takes for a woman to fall asleep is 8.15 minutes. The two variables we’re interested in here are Sex, either male or female, and Duration, which is the number of minutes that elapses from the start of a statistics lesson before a subject falls asleep. The data we’re using for this tutorial comes from a hypothetical study that examines how long it takes people to fall asleep during a statistics lesson. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to select cases in SPSS, and how to work with the resultant filtered data.

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