APA

Sweet, S., & Grace-Martin, K. (2012). Data Analysis with SPSS A First Course in Applied Statistics. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Importing files

All of the data provided with this test are in SPSS format, which makes your work much easier. However, at some point in your career, you may find it necessary to import statistical information from other format, such as Lotus, Excel, dBase, or ASCII. You will find SPSS has the capability of importing an Excel file.

Missing

If a person refused to answer a survey question, or responded that they were "unsure", there may be reasons to leave those individuals out of the study. But at the same time, we would not want to lose all the other information by dropping this case from the data set.

Getting start

In Variable View,

The column Label offers the opportunity to provide a more detailed description of each variable.

The column Label offers a way to associate a written description to the numerical coding of data with value labels.

Initial settings

Start the SPSS program, go to the Edit menu, and choose Options. Because we want to orient readers to the structure of data sets, in this book we specified that SPSS presents variable names in their file order. When SPSS presents output, we specified that it display both the variable names and variables labels. You should note, however, that many users prefer variables to be listed in alphabetical order, and there is no problem with this, other than the variable lists being presented in an order that is different than the way they are arrayed in the data set. As you work with the data, you will be able to determine which system works best for you.

Types of variables

String variables: e.g. dates, currencies

Categorical variables: e.g. ethnicity

 - ordinal: logical order

 - nominal: cannot be sequenced in a logical order

Scale variables
= numerical variables

 - Count variables: discrete values of whole numbers

 - Continuous variables: not restricted to whole numbers