Completing a wave
When the data collection is complete for the current wave of your tracking study and your Wave database contains all the responses for the current wave, you must transfer the data on the Wave database to the Report database. This frees the Wave database to be used for the next wave.
The procedure to do this is different for the first wave as compared with subsequent waves, because the Report database will not exist at the end of the first wave and therefore has to be created:
▪At the end of the first wave, run the data management script called TrackingStudy-CreateReportDB.dms. This creates the Report database, transfers the data from the Wave database to the Report database, and then creates a new metadata version in the Metadata Document (.mdd) file associated with the Report database. The version description is set to “Wave 1”.
▪At the end of the second or later wave, take a backup of the Report database. Then run the data management script called TrackingStudy-UpdateReportDB.dms. This adds the data on the Wave database to the Report database, and then creates a new metadata version in the Metadata Document (.mdd) file associated with the Report database. The version description is set to “Wave n”, where n is the wave number.
The Report database now contains the coded (if coding was performed) and weighted data for all the completed waves of your tracking study. You can tabulate the data using UNICOM Intelligence Reporter - Survey Tabulation. In addition, each record includes a categorical variable called Wave, which you can use to identify the wave in which the response was collected.
Note By default, the .dms scripts referred to above are installed in:
[INSTALL_FOLDER]\IBM\SPSS\DataCollection\7\DDL\Scripts\Data Management\DMS
See also