USING SPSS FOR RESEARCH AND DATA ANALYSIS

Abstract

There is no question that business, education, and all fields of science have come to rely heavily on the computer. This dependence has become so great that it is no longer possible to understand social and health science research without substantial knowledge of statistics and without at least some rudimentary understanding of statistical software. The number and types of statistical software packages that are available continue to grow each year. In this paper we have chosen to work with SPSS, or the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. SPSS was chosen because of its popularity within both academic and business circles, making it the most widely used package of its type. SPSS is also a versatile package that allows many different types of analyses. transformations, and forms of output - in short, it will more than adequately serve our purposes. The SPSS software package is continually being updated and improved, and so with each major revision comes a new version of that package. In this paper, we will describe and use the most recent version of SPSS, called SPSS for Windows, in order to use this text for data analysis, your must have access to the SPSS for Windows software package.The capability of SPSS is truly astounding. The package enables you to obtain statistics ranging from simple descriptive numbers to complex analyses of multivariate matrices. You can plot the data in histograms, scatterplots, and other ways. You can combine files, split files, and sort files. You can modify existing variables and create new ones. In short, you can do just about anything you'd ever want with a set of data using this software package. A number of specific SPSS procedures are relevant to the kinds of statistical analyses covered in an introductory level statistics or research methods course typically found in the social and health sciences, natural sciences, or business. Yet, we will touch on just a fraction of the many things that SPSS can do. Our aim is to help то become familiar with SPSS, and we hope that this introduction will both reinforce our understanding of statistics and lead us to see what a powerful tool SPSS is, how it can actually help you better understand your data, how it can enable you to test hypotheses that were once too difficult to consider, and how it can save our incredible amounts of time as well as reduce the likelihood of making errors in data analyses. We show how to create a data file and generate an output file. We also discuss how to name and save the different types of files created in the three main SPSS windows. This paper will present a software presentation from a survey on socio-economic and environmental research.