title: SPSS date format when imported into R
body: <p>I have not worked with SPSS (<code>.sav</code>) files before and am trying to work with some data files provided to me by importing them into R. I did not receive any explanation of the files, and because communication is difficult I am trying to figure out as much as I can on my own.</p>
  
  <p>Here's my first question. This is what the <code>Date</code> field looks like in an R data frame after import:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; dataset2$Date[1:4]
  [1] 13608172800 13608259200 13608345600 13608345600
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I don't know what dates the data is supposed to be for, but I found that if I divide the above numbers by 10, that seems to give a reasonable date (in February 2013). <strong>Can anyone confirm this is indeed what the above represents?</strong></p>
  
  <p>My second question is regarding another column called <code>Begin_time</code>. Here's what that looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; dataset2$Begin_time[1:4]
  [1] 29520 61800 21480 55080
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any idea what this is representing? I want to believe this is some representation of time of day because the records are for wildlife observations, but I haven't got more info than that to try to guess. I noticed that if I take the difference between <code>End_Time</code> and <code>Begin_time</code> I get numbers like 120 and 180, which seems like minutes to me (3 hours seems reasonable to observe a wild animal), but the absolute numbers are far greater than the number of minutes in a day (1440), so that leaves me puzzled. <strong>Is this some time keeping format from SPSS? If so, what's the logic?</strong></p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, I don't have access to SPSS, so any help would be much appreciated.</p>