 Your computer can analyze data without knowing what it is if it has numbers it'll work with numbers if that's text It'll it'll do something But for it to mean something to you as the analyst and maybe as your client You have to know what things mean and that means that you need to define your variables Give them their variable types as well as put labels on them that are going to help you as you try to make sense of things So for instance, here's a small data set. It's based on the one that I imported earlier It begins with an ID number That's helpful because you can go back and find particular cases So you always want to start with that Then I have three questions Q1 Q2 Q3 that are on one to five rating scales And then I have a question here. I've called it subscribed at the end and it's yes and no or why and N Now what we need to do is Say what kind of types each of these variables are as well as Give them labels as necessary now ID We don't really need to worry about this one But by default if a Jmov sees one through however many numbers, it's going to assume that it is a continuous scale Now we want to change the type You can do that either by double clicking on the name of the variable here or by going up to data and then clicking Setup either one will work and So the very first one is ID now technically ID numbers are not continuous or quantitative They're nominal where it's one per person. So I'm going to put nominal, but I'm going to say integer That's fine and we'll leave it like that and you see now that it's little icon here has switched from the ruler to the three circles Which indicate different categories or buckets That change by the way from ID from continuous nominal. It doesn't really make a difference. I'm going to go to the next variable Which is q1 and this is where I actually want to give it a real name and I might say something like like Website, so do they like your website and Now that shows up here. Now. This isn't the label. I just changed the name of the variable. I could give it a more thorough description Does the user like the company's website Now that label there is just for our own use. It doesn't really show up anywhere But what I'm going to do here is I'm going to change the variable type and I'm going to change the names of the levels Now it turns out that when you have a small number of categories or 1 2 3 4 5 is a small number Jmovi assumes that it's a categorical or nominal variable The thing is it doesn't really make a difference if you're going to be averaging or if you're going to be calculating statistics It'll do it on these variables. Even though they're defined as nominal You can change it to continuous or ordinal and that's going to affect the kinds of Graphs that you can make and is going to affect The ways that you can split the data So it's not critical if all you're going to do is average But if you want to do other things with it, it helps to define them Now a 1 to 5 rating scale There's a debate about what level of measurement it is technically. It's ordinal because higher numbers indicate More agreement or a higher evaluation of something On the other hand in every field I've ever seen people actually take a 1 to 5 rating scale and treat it as though It were continuous or quantitative so they can average it and so I'm actually going to come here and I'm going to define this one as Continuous now you'll see here that the levels went away Because now it's treating these as you know like time one seconds to five seconds doesn't have labels. And so that's fine and I know what it means. So I'm going to go ahead to the next one And I'm going to put here like Like price of your service and this one I'll put it as ordinal now You see that the levels here stayed and that's important And the last one here, I'll just put like like Product and I'm going to leave this one as nominal, but I'm now I'm going to change these levels So I'm actually going to change these labels. So for instance, I click right here at one and that's usually strongly disagree and Then the two is Disagree The three might be neither Four would be agree And five might be Strongly agree A lot of people call this a Lycurt scale. It's actually a response scale Lycurt scales have more to do with how you choose the questions as opposed to the format in which you respond to them But call it a Lycurt scale if you want it's a one to five rating scale And now you can see that these labels all show up down here That's really good convenient thing and remember the numbers are still underneath there So you can still do numerical operations on these variables The last one I want to show you is this text variable at the end You see it says nominal text because I actually typed in the letters Y and N and you can do the same thing with these I can click on the Y and I can put subscribed and I can maybe put They're not subscribed, but they came to your website. So we'll call my visitor And so now you have New names for the variables. I changed the names I changed the level of the measurement or the type of the variable for some of them say for instance from Continuous or quantitative to ordinal to Nominal or categorical and then I changed labels And so this is a very important step in terms of preparing the data into Moby because it's going to make it much easier for you To interpret the analyses and then in turn to make sense of it Especially when you're collaborating with a colleague or potentially working for a client