SDA 4.1 Documentation for SREPORT

NAME

sreport - SDA report generating program

USAGE

sreport [-b batchfile]

DESCRIPTION

SREPORT is a general-purpose program to generate summaries of one or more variables. The program reads a plain text data file plus a DDL file.

When SREPORT is run without `-b' and the name of a file, the program starts up in interactive mode, prompts the user for basic information about the desired report, and then writes a file that either can be run immediately or can be modified and executed later in batch mode.

Some of the more complex options can only be specified by inserting the appropriate commands manually into a command file. Even in such cases, it is generally advisable to begin the process of designing a report by running the program interactively at first, in order to generate something close to what you would like to end up with. Then the file of commands and templates produced by the interactive program can be edited and refined to create the final command file. See the SREPORT batch help file for a description of the keywords and formats used in specifying the layout of a report.

TYPES OF REPORTS AVAILABLE

There are two basic types of reports that can be produced:

1) ROWVARS - each row is a different variable; and the columns have a fixed meaning for every variable. For example:

2) BREAKVAR - each row is a category of the vertical or break variable; and the columns can be defined as functions of many different variables. For example:

This second type of report (BREAKVAR) is very flexible but can also be more complicated to lay out.

SOURCE OF DATA

The data for generating the report can be from one or more plain text fixed column data files, together with a DDL file. Since the ZEROS file of the CASES software system is a plain text file, SREPORT can easily be used to generate production reports for a CATI study.

FILTER AND WEIGHT VARIABLES

The report can be limited to a subset of cases by specifying one or more filter variables. A weight variable can also be specified, to give some cases more weight than others in the calculation of statistics. The unweighted number of cases, however, is always available for display and is used in calculating standard errors, unless requested otherwise.

OUTPUT SPECIFICATIONS

The user specifies the name of the file to receive the output produced by SREPORT, unless the report is simply to be displayed on the screen. Certain basic page formats can also be modified such as the length of each page (default = 66 lines).

STATISTICS TO DISPLAY

In interactive mode the user selects from a menu of statistics to display for each variable. The list includes the mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values, and the number of valid cases (the number of cases with values not flagged as missing data or not outside a defined range of values). The BREAKVAR type of report also provides for frequencies and percentages.

Certain functions of aggregates are also available for the more sophisticated user, but those functions must be edited into the template file by hand. See the documentation for the batch mode of SREPORT for a full description of available statistics and functions.

sreport batch	Commands for batch mode
sreport examples	Examples of SREPORT command files
sreport functions	Summary of SREPORT functions and formats
DDL	Data description language