User Jason has sent us the following question:
Upon exporting the data, we discovered that the downloaded .sav format files had a string width setting that was too narrow, which caused the answer to the problem with more content to be split into two new string columns to accommodate the original answer. Meanwhile, this process of splitting the data for storage has caused to the loss of some [unicode] characters.
SPSS has evolved its data storage format multiple times during its history before it formalize the current maximum length of strings at 32,767 bytes (known as ‘very long strings’). Survey Solutions attempts to save data in a format that SPSS would recognize and understand, but when it fails, the saved variable may indeed appear as ‘chunks’ of text.
Should this happen, the workaround is usually to import the tab-delimited version of the file (or just the affected variables from that file) or a Stata version of the exported data (modern SPSS should be comfortable reading Stata files in the format that Survey Solutions saves them).
Correspondingly, downloading data in ALL formats at the end of the survey is essential, precisely to avoid such format-specific issues.