I need to manipulate a variable in Survey Monkey but cannot find a work around. Do they have any help that is not texting but a phone consultant? Is it possible to create a new variable (what SPSS would call recoding) in Survey Monkey?
Survey monkey is an excellent service and they answer you very quickly any question. But in any case I recommend you to download the data gathered in a excel sheet (a feature that survey monkey permit in the results analysis web page) . Then you could make any manipulation that you want. In fact if you have a subscription higher than mine you could download it in SPSS format.
Survey Monkey is a data collection tool. It provides limited analysis options with the free version. You cannot manipulate data in it. You cannot even download your raw data unless you pay them one month's subscription, which is quite expensive. There are better tools around. Farmer et al. published a useful comparison of them in MSOR Connections a few years ago.
The best thing to do is to download your raw data into a spreadsheet and manipulate it there. If necessary you can then upload it to a statistical package and analyse it.