[yally04]

I'm considering using Filemaker to manage a whole lot of data collected from questionnaires for my thesis. For me Filemaker is more robust and nicer to use than Excel, but I haven't figured out how to create dummy variables, which is something I'll need for statistical analysis later.

Here's the deal: say I have a question with three answers, yes, no, and maybe. I can create a field with radio buttons for yes, no, and maybe, but rather than having a bunch of yes's, no's, or maybe's in the database, I'd like three different fields for the same question such that if I select yes there's a one in that field, and zeros in the other two.

I know I could do all this in Excel, but with 125 responses per questionnaire it's easier to enter data in a nice Filemaker layout using radio buttons and check boxes to speed things up.

Alternatively, is there any way to set a radio button to display one thing to the person entering data but to save a different value in the database? Such as, Yes saved as 1, No saved as 0, etc?

Any suggestions will be most appreciated!

[philm]

It would be quite simple to do this. One way would be to have a field (let's call it 'Response') with radio button as you suggest with 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' as the options. You could then set up three further fields called 'Yes flag', 'No flag' and 'Maybe flag' (or whatever). These should be set as calculation fields which look at the Response field. So, the calculation for 'Yes flag would be:

If(Response="Yes",1,0)

(Actually I forget the exact syntax for if...then.... statements in Filemaker, but you get the idea. ) Repeat for the other two calculation fields. I'm not quite sure why you would want to do this though!