linking info of pairs of respondents (couples) in SPSS

I am preparing for analyses of the determinants of partner choice in SPSS, but basically I can't get off the ground because I don't know how to create new variables based on the information of each respondent's spouse (i.e. education, wages, social background, ethnicity etc.).

Each respondent is currently identified by an ID#, and exist two places in the matrix: as unit/respondent and as a spouse (either wife or husband), instantiated in a different column. What I need is开发者_如何转开发 to use info from each row of variables pertaining to an individual as respondent - to create new variables in the row of each person's spouse.

If it helps, I also have a separate file with all couples linked row-wise, as variables of the same unit - evidently with the same ID# as in my "variables-file" (yesterday, however, I merged these files - hopefully correctly...).

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Assume you have a variables called age, weight, id and spouse_id in a file called main.sav

1. Make a copy of main.sav and call it spouse.sav
2. Relabel all the content variables in spouse.sav: i.e., make age spouse_age and weigh spouse_weight
3. Remove the variable id from spouse.sav
4. Open main.sav and merge in spouse.sav on the common ID spouse_id. I.e., data - merge files - add variables