SPSS 26 comes in both a new and the classic interface. We downloaded and tested the new interface. This review walks you through our main findings. SPSS 26 – Which “Subscription” Am I On? SPSS 26 – Data View & Variable View Tabs SPSS 26 – Menus & Dialogs SPSS 26 Output Tab – Tables […]
This tutorial covers some obvious and some less obvious functions for editing numeric variables. You can follow along with this tutorial by downloading and opening hospital.sav. They syntax we’ll use can be copy-pasted or downloaded here. Specifying User Missing Values This tutorial will only use the last 2 variables in the data.* Before doing anything else, we first specify […]
What is Factor Analysis? Quick Data Check Running Factor Analysis in SPSS SPSS Factor Analysis Output Adding Factor Scores to Our Data What is Factor Analysis? Factor analysis is a statistical technique for identifying which underlying factors are measured by a (much larger) number of observed variables.Such “underlying factors” are often variables that are difficult […]
Summary Learning just a handful of SPSS system settings allows you to get better results faster. This tutorial quickly walks you through the five most useful ones. We recommend you follow along with the examples by downloading and opening employees.sav. SPSS SET TNUMBERS SPSS TNUMBERS determine how data values are displayed. In SPSS, tnumbers (short for […]
One of the most common research questions is do different groups have different mean scores on some variable? This question is best answered in 3 steps: create a table showing mean scores per group -you’ll probably want to include the frequencies and standard deviations as well; create a chart showing mean scores per group; run some statistical test –ANOVA in this case. However, this […]
In some cases, ALTER TYPE in SPSS version 24 seems to report incorrect altered values when converting a string to a numeric value. This results in messed up data while SPSS reports that everything is fine. Let’s try and replicate the problem with the example below. Example We imported some .csv data in which some numeric values were flagged with an “a”. This indicates […]
Boldface Absolute Correlations > 0.5 Set Decimal Places for Output Tables Transpose One or Many Output Tables Delete Selection of Output Items Set Font Sizes and Styling for Output Tables Set Exact Sizes for Charts All examples require SPSS version 22 or higher. We’ll use bank_clean.sav -screenshot below- throughout this entire tutorial. OUTPUT MODIFY – What and Why? OUTPUT MODIFY […]
Running some basic descriptive statistics in SPSS is super easy with the DESCRIPTIVES command. However, the resulting table doesn’t even come close to the APA required format or what corporate clients often demand. So what’s the problem? Well, you’ll quickly find out if you try and create the table shown below. Nice and clean APA descriptives table. SPSS DESCRIPTIVES […]
EXECUTE runs pending transformations but many SPSS users don’t have a clue what that means. More importantly, when should you (not) run EXECUTE? And when do you really need it? Let’s dive in. We’ll use adratings.sav throughout, part of which is shown below. SPSS “Transformations Pending” As you probably figured out, our data hold 18 respondents who rated 3 different advertisements. […]
In SPSS, we sometimes encounter variables that are negatively coded: lower values indicate higher agreement or more positive sentiments. Although this is not really “wrong” in any way, positive coding is more intuitive. Especially when reporting means over variables, most readers naturally expect higher means to indicate something better, not worse. So what’s the best way to reverse code variables? […]
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 […]
Many easy options have been proposed for combining the values of categorical variables in SPSS. However, the real information is usually in the value labels instead of the values. This tutorial proposes a simple trick for combining categorical variables and automatically applying correct value labels to the result. SPSS Combine Categorical Variables Example You may follow along by downloading and opening hospital.sav. Now say […]
