Today, you'll learn how to open SPSS (Statistical Product and Service Solutions, formerly Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and save a data file to a disk. SPSS is basically a spread sheet that allows researchers to perform statistical tests on data. Data must be numeric because numbers are used to do statistics. All answers on an attitude survey, for instance, translate into numbers. The menu functions are as follows: FILE: New, Open, Read Text Data, Save, Save As and Print. EDIT: These are the basic Windows editing options. VIEW: We will stay with the defaults DATA: We'll return to these when we set up our own data. TRANSFORM: Compute and Recode are the only things we will use here and we'll discuss them more fully later. ANALYZE: We'll be looking at selected procedures here mostly under Descriptive Statistics, Compare Means, and Correlate. This only scratches the surface of what SPSS will do. GRAPHS: You're welcome to play with them. We won't cover them in this class. UTILITIES: Note that the Variables command gives them a quick way to check on such things as labels and missing values and the File command provides basic information. The other stuff is rarely used. WINDOW: Ignore it. HELP: Search provides a good way to find information, and that Statistics Coach can be very helpful. You should work your way through the Tutor. If you don't
understand something in this Web note, please e-mail
Dr. Sitton.
Revised 092811 — http://www.uamont.edu/FacultyWeb/sitton/crz/mrea/spssmenu.html |
