There are times when you need a program that was created for statistical analysis in social science. Maybe you are a college student that is learning statistical analysis or a market researcher, who knows. Or maybe you are just curious to know what is SPSS and what it can do! Today you will get the answers to your questions, so continue reading.
What is the SPSS meaning?
Before talking about the SPSS software, let us figure out ‘what does SPSS mean?’ This stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. As you can see, the name reflects the original market of this software, the social sciences. However, the current versions of this software package is officially named IBM SPSS Statistics.
It is known that the program is used for non-batched and batched statistical analysis. Don’t worry, eventually, we will cover the uses of the SPSS Statistics.
The program can be used on various operating systems, including:
– Linux on z Systems;
– Unix;
– Windows;
– macOS;
– Linux.
What can SPSS do?
SPSS Statistics was initially released in 1968, while the last stable release was on 15 of March 2016. Before that time, researchers had a tough job – they had to run various statistical tests on data sets withy their own hands. Just imagine for how long they were doing that – it definitely took a lot of time and effort! Fortunately for researchers, today we have the software package that helps them do their jobs.
Now it is more widespread and is used in different fields and by various people including:
– data miners;
– health researchers;
– market researchers;
– education researchers;
– different marketing organizations;
– survey companies;
– other companies and organizations that require data documentation, statistical analysis, and data management.
But we still want to know:
What is SPSS used for?
You will be surprised to know that IBM SPSS Statistics has a lot to offer for those working with various data. It is used for file reshaping, data analysis, creation of derived data, data management, statistical analysis. Besides the already described features, there are also other statistics that are included in the base software:
– Linear regression which is used for prediction of numerical outcomes;
– Descriptives and frequencies;
– Cross tabulation;
– Descriptive ratio statistics;
– Factor analysis, discriminant, cluster analysis that are used for prediction for identifying groups.
– Bivariate statistics that include correlation, means, t-test, nonparametric tests, and ANOVA.
You can access the features of this program through the pull-down menus or, if you are strong in this field, “create” them using the proprietary 4GL command syntax language.
Besides the main features, the software can also write and read data from various ASCII files, databases, spreadsheets or statistics packages. You may also use SPSS Statistics to write and read the external relational database tables by using SQL or ODBC.
How to use SPSS statistics?
READ ALSO: Highest currency in the world 2017 – Top 10
Here is an example of using the SPSS statistics. Let’s say that a researcher needs to collect data. He enters the variables and the quantity data into the data entry screen of SPSS. He may organize the data and assign various properties to the variables.
Organizing data is very helpful because the next time he accesses the file could be months or years. He certainly won’t remember the exact variables he put in, but because he organized the data in the past, he will be able to quickly find the needed data.
The researcher will then collect the needed data, enter it in the sheet and organise it properly. Now it is time to create an output file that can be used in the future.
The output of the software is to a *.spv file or the proprietary file format. It can be exported to the text of Excel, PDF, Microsoft Word. There are other options for capturing output:
– as text;
– as data by using the OMS command;
– as PDF;
– as SPSS data set;
– as HTML;
– as XLS;
– as XML.
– as various image formats (BMP, JPEG, EMF, PNG).
The researcher can use SPSS statistics to run various statistical tests. As we mentioned before, there are a lot of things that are built into the program, so it will be easy for the researcher to do what he has to do.
He can also transform the existing data with various statistical transformations that the software package is offering.
This is one of the many things that you can do in SPSS statistics. This software package is still widely popular. There is even an SPSS Statistics Server version that has a client/server architecture. If you have the older version of SPSS (older than 19, while the current is 24.0), then you won’t be able to use the feature of scoring functions. But we think that most of the users already have the current version.
Congratulations – now you know what SPSS is and what is SPSS used for. Unfortunately, IBM SPSS Statistics is not free. However, there is a free trial if you want to give it a shot. Good luck with your data collection, organization, and statistical tests!
READ ALSO: Difference between marketing and selling
0naze
No comments:
Post a Comment