SPSS is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social science. It is also used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and others. The original SPSS manual (Nie, Bent & Hull, 1970) has been described as one of “sociology’s most influential books” for allowing ordinary researchers to do their own statistical analysis. In addition to statistical analysis, data management (case selection, file reshaping, creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored in the datafile) are features of the base software.
A common problem with SPSS data files are unlabeled variables with huge names. These cause several problems: editing and analyzing your data takes too much time and effort; your syntax becomes unreadable and unmanageable; your output looks terrible. The way to go in this case is setting such variable names as labels. Next, set nice and short […]
A frequency distribution is an overview of all distinct values in some variable and the number of times they occur. That is, a frequency distribution tells how frequencies are distributed over values. Frequency distributions are mostly used for summarizing categorical variables. That’s because metric variables tend to have many distinct values. These result in huge tables and charts that don’t give insight into […]
While working on data holding a record for each day, I wanted to create some graphs on week level. So I extracted the weeks with XDATE.WEEK but the week numbers returned by SPSS are nonsensical: every week starts on January 1 and most years end up with week 53 holding just 1 day. There’s different standards for week […]
SPSS hasn’t exactly been known for generating nice charts, although you really can do so by using your own chart templates. SPSS 25, however, allows you to “create great looking charts by default!” This made me wonder: are the new charts really that great? The remainder of this article walks through the old and new looks for the big 5 charts in […]
I’m a pretty happy SPSS user but since a while, the software has been telling me that “Your license will expire in … days.” I had already extended my license with another year but -apparently- SPSS seemed to be oblivious to that. It took me some trial and error to troubleshoot the issue. Since I’m running this […]
SPSS basic operators are mainly used with IF, DO IF and COMPUTE. They work mostly as you’d expect but they do have a couple of surprises in store. No worries, we’ll walk you through. We’ll demonstrate how to get things done on the last 5 variables in hospital.sav. Before jumping into SPSS operators, we’ll first set 6 […]
Summary Example of Euro signs in Data View Some SPSS data files contain variables that reflect amounts of money such as revenue or expenses. If so, you probably want to display the correct currencies in data view as well as your output tables and charts. This tutorial quickly shows how to do just that. Creating […]
Summary SPSS commands come in three basic types: procedures, transformations and other commands. Understanding this distinction will allow you to get things done in SPSS faster and more efficiently. SPSS Command Types Diagram SPSS Transformations As shown in the figure, the first question is when a command is executed. Some SPSS commands are not carried out […]
Summary This tutorial walks you through opening a .csv data file in SPSS. We chose a .csv file as obtained from Google Analytics (GA). Since many readers may be unfamiliar with GA, the screenshot below gives a basic idea of what the data look like before we export them as a .csv file. The original […]
Our blog holds a collection of tutorials that don’t really fit into any meaningful category but we wanted to write them anyway. The tutorials below cover all sorts of SPSS related best practices, tips, tricks, bugs and pitfalls. Suggestions for new posts are always appreciated! September 2019 Spearman Rank Correlations – Simple Tutorial SPSS 26 – Review […]
Introduction You may have heard the phrase that “computers only process ones and zeroes”. These are formally referred to as bits. This raises the question how computers represent letters (like Y, e and s). Representing characters using only bits basically involves two steps. First, each letter is represented by a number. Second, each number is represented by […]
Definition An SPSS macro is a function defined by the user in order to automate some task(s). SPSS Macro Syntax As discussed earlier, Python uses program blocks that start with BEGIN PROGRAM. and end with END PROGRAM.. A different kind of program block may start with DEFINE and end with !ENDDEFINE.. Between these commands you’ll find code that looks a lot like basic […]
In SPSS, LAG is a function that returns the value of a previous case. It’s mostly used on data with multiple rows of data per respondent. Here it comes in handy for calculating cumulative sums or counts. SPSS Lag Function SPSS LAG – Basic Example 1 The most basic way to use LAG is COMPUTE V1 = LAG(V2). This […]
SPSS transformations between DO IF … and END IF are applied only to cases (rows of data) that satisfy one or more conditions. In many cases, IF is a faster way to accomplish the same results. SPSS Do If Example Say we’d like to convert people’s monthly income into income classes. We may want to use different cut […]
This tutorial explains what SPSS datasets are. For a practical tutorial on working with datasets, see SPSS Datasets Tutorial 1 – Basics. Right, now an SPSS dataset is SPSS data that only exists in your computer’s working memory (RAM). Changes you make to it are discarded unless it’s saved as a data file. SPSS Data File and Dataset […]
Definition SPSS’ ANY is used to compare one value to a set of other values. SPSS Any – Basics ANY(a,b,c[,d…]) checks whether a is equal to any of the b, c[,d…]. Note that the first value is compared to the second through the last values. Each of these can either be a constant (“6”) or a variable (“v1”) over respondents. SPSS Any – Examples Suppose […]
Summary SPSS transformation commands (or simply “transformations”) can be loosely defined as commands that are not immediately carried out when you run them. Instead, they are kept in mind by SPSS and executed only when necessary. The table below gives an overview of SPSS’ main tranformation commands. Main SPSS Tranformation Commands COMMAND NAME GOAL TYPICAL USAGE […]
The assumption of equal intervals says that all distances between adjacent answer categories are equal in the repondents’ perception. This assumption is an attempt to justify treating ordinal variables as if they were metric variables. Doing so enables one to compute means, standard deviations and Pearson correlations on ordinal variables. This is simpler than using more appropriate techniques. Assumption of Equal […]
When we’re writing about SPSS or statistics in general, we often wonder if our readers really understand all the terminology we use such as variance, histogram or z-scores. For those we don’t, we wrote some background tutorials on such terms. These background tutorials are listed below.Hope you find them helpful! Glossary SPSS TEMPORARY Command Assumption of Equal Intervals – Calculations on […]
