Thread: aggregate a variable with SPSS

Long post so be warned I'm working on a "lab assignment" using SPSS 15.0. My data set is different variables for the 50 states plus D.C. and I just followed step-by-step how to create categorical variables from a continuous variable (the variable "income" , I went to Transform-Compute variable to to create categorical variables that separated income into "low", "medium" and "high" groups, as an example).

I'm stuck on the last part of the assignment that asks me to create a new variable called Region, and that I should look off the map that accompanies the lab to "enter the variable's data values Northeast, Midwest, West, South". For example, Alabama is south, Colorado is west, etc. Aggregate 1990 population along the census regions (census regions meaning the labels of Midwest, South, etc)."

I'm confused on how to do this. I know that labels like South, Midwest, etc are "string", like the labels of low, med, and high in the previous step were also string (this is the only hint my prof would give me, btw). Except I don't know what the string expression should be?

Ignore that, I'm a ditz. I overlooked something simple