One of the more time-consuming aspects of writing a manuscript is the visuals. Interaction plots for example are often included for most studies that include interaction/moderation effects. SPSS has a nice Graph Builder tool that facilitates the drawing of plots and provides a degree of customisation, but sometimes it is necessary to dig into SPSS code. One example is a study of mine on spiral of silence which looks at variables that lead to less expression. But because I wanted to emphasise the idea of greater inhibition I wanted the y axis of the chart to start with positive values leading to negative values. Not so simple with the mouse-click SPSS! Thanks to Google however (search term “spss graph reverse axis”) the solution was quick to find – just a minor modification of the SPSS script with the SCALE command. Just one of the many on the fly things that a researcher has to go through when writing a paper — and its good to learn something new in the process!
