yves sukhu

29SLIDES TO INTRODUCE

SPSSFOR THE BEGINNER IN STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MODELING

Statistical Product and Service Solutions.

The SPSS acronym used to stand for:

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HistorySPSS has a long heritage

• Introduced in 1968.• Was originally developed to facilitate statistical

analysis in the social sciences.• Early versions designed to run on mainframe

computers.• Purchased by IBM® in 2009 for more than $1 billion

dollars!

SPSS: An IBM® Company Now the company is known as:

very user friendly

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General CapabilitiesSPSS has a lot of great features• Can import data from many different sources, such

as Microsoft® Excel and SAS®.• Provides analysis tools to generate reports, charts,

plots, descriptive statistics, and run advanced statistical analyses.

• In addition to user interface, provides a command syntax that can simplify certain things, such as running repetitive tasks.

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SPSS EditorsGetting familiar with the SPSS user interface• There are different windows that the user uses to

interact with SPSS.• These are called “Editors”.• Some of the common Editor windows are:– Data Editor (enter and view your data)– Syntax Editor (edit your data manipulation syntax)– Viewer Editor (view results from your analysis)– Chart Editor (edit and save charts in the chart editor)

data editor

syntax editor

viewer editor

chart editor

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Manually Entering DataSPSS makes it easy.• Start with the Data Editor.• There are two tabs at the bottom:– Data View– Variable View

• Gives you two ways to enter data:– Start with Data View and just start typing!– Start with Variable View and define your variables first.• Think of variables as labels that describe your data.

housing dataLet’s try it out with some hypothetical

the address, price, yearWe’ll use

built, and square footageto describe each home

entering data with data view

Data is entered by row. So, just start typing the data starting with row 1. Notice that SPSS gives each column an arbitrary (e.g. VAR00003) variable (or label) name.

defined our variablesIf we take a look at the Variable View, SPSS has

our variables look like…

SPSS noticed that the first column is text data (the home address). Notice also, that SPSS gives this variable a specific width of 21 characters based on the first entry. That means every subsequent address entry can not be more than 21 characters, unless we change the width here.

we can edit our variables

To edit a variable, just click on it and change the value. In this case, we changed the name to “Address” and the width to “30”.

Variable View firstNow let’s enter data again, but we’ll start with the

as soon as you type a label…

SPSS pre-populates

edit itJust click on a variable attribute to

clicking on “Type”

Now you can edit the variable type. In this case, we would change it to “String” and adjust the Width to a larger value.

clicking on “Label”

You can add descriptions (“labels”)to your variables.

entering all our variables

can not have spacesOne thing to keep in mind is that variable names

(e.g. “YearBuilt” is ok, but “Year Built” will cause an error)

now we can enter our data

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Importing DataYou can import from a variety of sources.• Easier than manually copying data into SPSS.• You have a lot of out-of-box import options:

IBM® SPSS.It’s that easy to get started with

You can download a 14-day trial at:http://www14.software.ibm.com/download/data/web/en_US/trialprograms/W110742E06714B29.html