Create New Variables - Scale Variable(s) - Ranks Within Variable

This QScript transformation creates a new variable for each selected variable which containins the ranks of the data within each variable.

Example

Consider the table below, which shows the raw data for five people on three variables related to their readership of a certain publication:

Ranking within variable will apply the rank transformation for each column in the data to yield the following:

The smallest value from each column is assigned the lowest rank, and the largest value in each column is assigned the highest rank.

Technical details

Ranking is a statistical transformation that can be used on Numeric and Ordinal data that replaces the source values in the data with their rank value after being sorted. See for example, the the Wikipedia page for information on a rank transformation. To use this transformation, the user selects one or more questions that that are NumberNumeric or Categorical variable types. For NumberNumeric variables, the ranking is determined with the smallest value in the variable taking the rank of 1, the second smallest taking the rank of 2 and so on until all the values have been ranked. If there are any ties in the data, then they share the average rank. For Categorical variables, a similar procedure applies except that the categorical value attribute labels are mapped to their the source numeric values to determine the ranking.

How to apply this QScript

Start typing the name of the QScript into the Search features and data box in the top right of the Q window.
Click on the QScript when it appears in the QScripts and Rules section of the search results.

OR

Select Automate > Browse Online Library.
Select this QScript from the list.

Customizing the QScript

This QScript is written in JavaScript and can be customized by copying and modifying the JavaScript.

Customizing QScripts in Q4.11 and more recent versions

Start typing the name of the QScript into the Search features and data box in the top right of the Q window.
Hover your mouse over the QScript when it appears in the QScripts and Rules section of the search results.
Press Edit a Copy (bottom-left corner of the preview).
Modify the JavaScript (see QScripts for more detail on this).
Either:
- Run the QScript, by pressing the blue triangle button.
- Save the QScript and run it at a later time, using Automate > Run QScript (Macro) from File.

Customizing QScripts in older versions

Copy the JavaScript shown on this page.
Create a new text file, giving it a file extension of .QScript. See here for more information about how to do this.
Modify the JavaScript (see QScripts for more detail on this).
Run the file using Automate > Run QScript (Macro) from File.

JavaScript

includeWeb("QScript Scale Functions");

scaleQuestions("rank", false);