Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

SPSS

Proficiency with statistical software packages is indispensable today for serious research in the sciences. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is one of the most widely available and powerful statistical software packages. It covers a broad range of statistical procedures that allow you to summarize data (e.g., compute means and standard deviations), determine whether there are significant differences between groups (e.g., t-tests, analysis of variance), examine relationships among variables (e.g., correlation, multiple regression), and graph results (e.g., bar charts, line graphs).

Tutorial Overview

These lessons will give you a basic introduction to SPSS. They are designed for people who have some background in statistics or to be used in conjunction with a statistics text for students who are enrolled in a statistics course. Once you are comfortable with SPSS, we encourage you to explore the SPSS menus and options because the package is very powerful and there are many ways to accomplish your statistical goals.

 

You should start with Lesson 1, which presents a brief overview of the different types of windows and files that are available with SPSS. You should then go to Lesson 2 because it describes how to enter and label your data and conduct basic descriptive statistics (e.g., mean and standard deviation). The latter part of this lesson describes how to perform transformations on your data (e.g., convert numbers to percentages or proportions) and select different subgroups of cases or participants for analyses (e.g., select only males or only females).

 

Once you understand how to enter your data, you may go on to any of the other lessons. Each of these lessons includes a research problem, hypothetical set of data, and step-by-step directions for how to perform the specified analyses. An additional example for further practice is also included. Lessons 3-5 describe specific statistical procedures that are often used (t-test, analysis of variance, correlation). Lessons 4 and 5 also include instructions on how to construct tables of means and/or graphs that are appropriate for the type of data you are analyzing.

 

You should realize that these tutorials cover only a few of the statistical procedures that are available with SPSS. Once you have a good feel for how to enter data and perform some of the statistical tests that are described here, we urge you to experiment and try out new statistical procedures. With a basic familiarity of how SPSS works and understanding of the statistical test that you wish to use, we are confident that you will be able to figure out other procedures on your own.

Lessons

Lesson 1: SPSS windows and files

 

Lesson 2: Entering data and computing descriptive statistics

 

Lesson 3: Computing a t-test

 

Lesson 4: Computing an analysis of variance

 

Lesson 5: Computing a correlation and a scatterplot

 

  

These lessons developed by Gil Einstein, Furman University, copyright 1997.