Clear Missing Data

 

Menu location: Data_Cleaning and Encoding_Clear Missing Data

 

This function enables you to clear missing data values from a selection of cells, and to optionally preserve the matching of rows in that selection.

 

For example, you might want to ignore incomplete records. Here, each row is a record for one individual, so you would normally choose to preserve the matching of rows when prompted:

 

Sex	Age	Score
1	23	2.3
1	33	3.1
1	19
2	21	1.9
2	43
2	39	5.0
2	26	1.1

 

Clearing missing data with the row matching option ON would produce:

 

Sex	Age	Score
1	23	2.3
1	33	3.1
2	21	1.9
2	39	5.0
2	26	1.1

 

…and clearing missing data with the row matching option OFF would produce:

 

Sex	Age	Score
1	23	2.3
1	33	3.1
1	19	1.9
2	21	5.0
2	43	1.1
2	39
2	26

 

StatsDirect treats the following number, characters and text as missing data:

3E+300

*

.

missing

<just spaces>

 

You may additionally define missing numbers or text codes when prompted. This is often useful when you have been given data with missing values coded in a specific way, e.g. a score of -1 in the example above.