I am a PhD student and I am finally ready to administer a bunch of questionnaires along with 3 IAT's to about 200 participants.

I wanted to know if I should prepare syntax within the questionnaire syntax which organizes my data into columns, rows etc. I noticed this was done for the "Eating Disorder Inventory": example:

<data >

/ file = "EDI_summarydata.iqdat"

/ columns = [date, time, subject, expressions.totalscore,  values.misseditems, values.number_misseditems,

expressions.subtest1, values.maxscore_subtest1, values.missed1,

</data>

Also, is there a way to prepare in advance what the IAT data will look like?

Or if I take the IAT as a sample run, how do I retrieve that data so I know what to prepare for when the participants have completed the survey?

Thank you for any help you can offer!

Amina

Most scripts provide summary data which will make any elaborate pre-processing in stats applications largely unnecessary. If you are interested in any particular scripts output, you should generate test data and study said output (along with any comments in the script as well as the relevant literature). SPSS syntax for the IAT scripts is available at the respective page in the Task Library. You'll want to study that, too. Finally, for a general, practical introduction to RT data preparation, see Lacroix & Giguère (2006).