I will probably not be implementing any suggestion that requests a multi-checkbox style question... [examples] The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information....[examples] Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.

I assume you can put the spreadsheet in excel, yes? Excel is much more powerful than Google docs, and I don't know SPSS.

If so, what you need is to add columns for each option, and put in the relevant version of the line below:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("hiking",A1)),"hikes"," ")

This will search the text in box A1 (assume column A is the one with answers like "hiking, swimming, sailing" or whatever), and if it contains the text "hiking" will write "hikes", and if not will write nothing (or "doesn't hike")

If I didn't explain well enough, let me know!

ETA: And if you don't mind just having "TRUE" and "FALSE" as your output (instead of "hikes" and " ") then you can also just use

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("hiking",A1))