Miss Psychobabble: A Basic Introduction to SPSS

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SPSS, originally produced by SPSS Inc., stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. It is one of the most widely used software, which can perform highly complex data analysis and manipulation. In 2009, IBM acquired its full rights and officially named it as IBM SPSS Statistics.

Aside from psychology and other social sciences, it is popularly used in the business, health, government, and banking sectors. With its pervasive nature, you cannot escape SPSS if you are a psychology major or a researcher. As nerdy as this might sound, I have to admit, I loved using SPSS during my school years, although majority of the students disliked it.
My fondness for the software can be rooted from my interest in programming, organizing, and analyzing data. If you are my complete opposite, I suggest for you to brush up on the basics of SPSS; only then can you finally appreciate its capabilities.

 Functionalities of SPSS
The fundamental use of SPSS is to analyze your data in three ways namely:  
  1. Describe the data using descriptive statistics, 
  2. Examine the relationships between several variables, and 
  3. Compare the groups to determine if there are significant differences.
Some of its functionalities include:
  • Descriptive Statistics
  • Contingency tables
  • Reliability tests
  • Correlation
  • T-tests
  • ANOVA
  • MANOVA
  • Forecasting
  • Survival analysis
  • Regression

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SYNTAX LANGUAGE OF SPSS
The proprietary language of SPSS is known as the syntax command language or syntax, for short. Here is the full list of the syntax used:
  • Name
  • Type
  • Width
  • Decimals
  • Label
  • Values
  • Missing
  • Columns
  • Align
  • Measure
  • Role

 Further Recommendations
Read more about everything SPSS in my favorite free online website here (https://statistics.laerd.com/features-overview.php). As a beginner, it is best to browse more on the basic steps in using SPSS.  Know the steps by watching an informative video here:


Website Resources:
http://www.uwindsor.ca/its/sites/uwindsor.ca.its/files/What%20is%20SPSS.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/spss-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html

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