SPSS

SPSS data files (POR and SAV formats).

Supported Versions

Dataverse supports reading of all SPSS versions 7 to 22. But please see the “Limitations” section.

Limitations

SPSS does not openly publish the specifications of their proprietary file formats. Our ability to read and parse their files is based on some documentation online from unofficial sources, and some reverse engineering. Because of that we cannot, unfortunately, guarantee to be able to process any SPSS file uploaded.

However, we’ve been improving this process for a few years by now, and it should be quite robust in the current version of Dataverse. Thus your chances of success - uploading an SPSS files and having it turned into a fully functional tabular data table in the Dataverse - should be reasonably good.

Support for Language Encodings in SPSS

Historically, there was no support for specifying a particular language/code page encoding for the data stored in an SPSS file. Meaning, text values in none-ASCII encodings, or non-Latin characters could be entered and stored, but there was no setting to unambiguously specify what language, or what character set it was. By default, Dataverse will try to interpret binary characters as UTF8. If that’s not working - for example, if the descriptive labels and/or categorical values ingest as garbage - and if you happen to know what encoding was used in the original file, you can now specify it in the Ingest Options.

For example, if you know that the text in your SAV file is in Mandarin, and is encoded using the GB2312, specify it as follows:

Upload your file, in the “Edit Files” tab of the Dataset page. Once the file is recognized as SPSS/save, and before you click Save, go into the “Advanced Ingest Options”, and select “Simplified Chinese, GB2312” in the nested menu under “Language Encoding” -> “East Asian”.