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SPSS Statistical Software

This guide covers the basics of SPSS, including how to conduct simple statistical analyses and data visualization. (The Guide is currently a work in progrss, so some content is not in here yet).

What is SPSS?

SPSS stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and it is a statistical software platform designed for editing and analyzing data. 

As the name implies, SPSS is mainly used in social science research, however any discipline can utilize SPSS for data analysis.

Some nice features of SPSS:

  1. You can import data files from various sources (such as Excel, CSV, Stata, SAS, SQL), so you can use it in combination with most datasets you may have collected in those other formats.

  2. SPSS is compatible with both PCs and Macs, and the interface looks nearly identical.

  3. SPSS utilizes a point-and-click interface as opposed to a programming interface, like R or SAS, which makes it a little more intuitive and user-friendly for anyone who is a novice to data analysis.

What's in this Guide

In this guide you will find:

  • What is SPSS and what can it do?
  • Information on how to use SPSS
  • Instructions on simple data cleaning in SPSS
  • Instructions on running descriptive statistics in SPSS
  • Instructions on running basic inferential statistics in SPSS
  • Instructions on creating basic graphs/charts in SPSS

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