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SPSS
is the most widely-used system of computer
programs for social analysis. It was
conceived by a humble graduate student in
political science at Stanford University
in the late 1960s. Norman Nie, now
Chairmand of the Board at SPSS Inc. and
Professor of Political Science at
Stanford, has seen his creation spread to
thousands of universities and businesses
across the world. SAS, another program
favored by economists, is SPSS's major
rival as a statistical package. SPSS and
SAS have so many capabilities that even
skilled researchers never learn the
systems completely. In this course, you
will only learn the basic procedures in
SPSS. These will be enough to equip you
for elementary data analysis.
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Our
basic taxt will be the SPSS Base 10.0
Applications Guide (Chicago: SPSS,
1999). This is an adequate reference, but
it is not likely to prove good for
learning.
The
SPSS program itself has a Tutorial that I
urge you to go through. Please understand
that learning SPSS is a little like
learning a new word processing system (or
a new language). Learning won't come
quickly to most of you, but you will learn
it through repetition. I understand that
and will try to help you learn as best I
can in class.
I'll
demonstrate the program's usage in class
on Friday. Armed with this visualization,
you can try your hand at entering into the
SPSS Data Editor the few items of data
associated with the 10 states that you
selected at random for today's
assignment.
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