Walkthrough

This guide is intended to help you when you are first confronted with a data set in SPSS.

First thing to do would be to turn on the viewer, so that you can see your syntax in the output.
    Edit-Options-Viewer-Display commands in the log

Throughout this guide there are items with (not worth doing) behind them, for this course you will not need to
use these functions.

Next thing to do is to see what kinds of variables are contained in your data set. Choose the variable view and look at the different variables, make a note of which ones are categorical (does the data in the cell implicate that this subject is a certain member of a group i.e. gender or condition), and which ones are continuous (is the data in the cell continuous in nature or an unlimited range i.e. a score, a time, a weight, an amount, or a length).

You need to figure out which of the variables where the dependent and independent in the study. Remember that before you do any inferential statistics you should ALWAYS do the descriptive ones first. You need to identify values that are entered in correctly as well as potential outliers.

Here is how to find the Descriptive Statistics for a Data set:
    Analyze
        Descriptive Statistics
           Frequencies: Run this to show all the values that were entered for a variable.
           Descriptive: Shows the descriptive statistics
           Explore: Gives summary statistics and graphs, either for all of your cases or separately for groups of cases
           CrossTabs: Chi-square
           Ratio: provides a list of summary statistics for describing the ratio between two scale variables (not worth doing)

Here is how to find the Inferential Statistics for a Data set:

    Analyze
        General Linear Model
            ANOVA: Univariate Analysis of Variance, Comparing various groups on a dependent variable, use when your groups are independent.
          Repeated Measures ANOVA: use if one or more of your variables are repeated measures

page created by Ryan Pohlig