In this video, I'm gonna provide an introduction to SPSS and PASW. So, first off, lemme just
say that regarding the name, SPSS, PASW, two different names for the same program. And
I'm gonna refer to it as SPSS. Now I'm working on version eighteen, which is, should be basically
the same as slightly older and slightly newer versions. And lemme just say this introduction
is more for people who've had little to no experience with SPSS. In future videos, things
will get more advanced. So first off, what is SPSS. Well, it's a pretty popular program
for statistical analysis. It's used most often in the behavioral sciences like psychology,
but it can do lots of different things and it works well for lots of different fields.
And it's great because you can do really complex statistical analyses with just a few mouse
clicks. The downside is that you're pretty far removed from the actual calculations.
For that reason, these videos are gonna focus mostly on just how to use SPSS. If you want
more of a conceptual explanation of the different statistical procedures, I recommend you check
out my other series of videos, Excel for statistics. Now a few caveats about SPSS: like I said,
it's pretty easy to run analyses, but your data have to be set up in just the right way.
And when you do run the analyses, you often get a lot more than you need in the output
window. So a trick to using this program is knowing where to look for relevant information.
So let's start with the basics, there are two view modes to SPSS, there's data view
and variable view. Data view, which we're in right now, is basically just a spreadsheet,
and this is where you see all your data and this is where you enter in all your data.
Each row is dedicated to one participant or subject or case, and each column is dedicated
to a different variable, or type of measurement you're taking from each one of the participants.
So just try popping in some numbers, I'll just do one, two, three. You'll see that as
you enter in a number in a column, that column kind of comes to life. The variable automatically
gets named, and it's properties are set by default. However, notice the name is V-A-R,
zero-zero-zero-one. That stands for variable one, if you type in more number, more properties,
or more variables that get defined, and their default names will be variable two, variable
three, variable four, and this can get kind of confusing especially if you have lots of
variables and they're all named almost exactly the same thing. And also, the default properties
for each variable may not be exactly what you want, so we should learn how to change
some of those things. So we change them in variable view, and you can get to that by
clicking on that little button in the lower left. This lists all your variables in rows,
and all the properties are in columns. And I'm just gonna go ahead and delete variable
two because we don't need that right now. The first property, and probably one of the
more important ones, is name. I recommend you change this immediately to something more
descriptive.. You can call it anything you want, but it just can't have spaces in it,
special characters, and it can't start with a number. So just double click on that, and
just highlight it, you can change it to something. You don't need to worry about what it does
and doesn't allow because if you do something it doesn't like, like having a space, if you
hit enter, it will say variable contains illegal character. So just try something else. I'll
try random underscore name. Camel case works equally well. So now we have a slightly more
descriptive name, which will help us differentiate our different variables. If you want something
even more descriptive, you can go over here to label, and here you can call it literally
anything you want. There's no restrictions on what you call it. When you run analyses,
this name will show up in the output window. It's not gonna show up in data view, in data
view you just have whatever the name is. But the label will show up in the apple window,
which can help you further differentiate between your different variables. So another important
property is type. Type reflects what kind of data you're dealing with. The default is
numeric, which indicates you're dealing with numbers. You can also change this to dates,
if you're recording dates, or dollar amounts. Or a string variable, which is basically letters
or words. And honestly, for the most part if you're analyzing data, I think numeric
will be okay, for most of what you're doing. And probably only the other type of property
you need to worry about right now is measure, which is over on the right. Now this specifies
what scale of measurement you're using. A stats book will usually tell you that the
four scales of measurement are nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. If you wanna know more
about that I recommend you just find a stats book and read about it. The only thing I'll
say about it right now is that SPSS, in SPSS, nominal means nominal, ordinal means ordinal,
but if you're dealing with interval or ratio scales, SPSS has the same setting for both
of those, it calls them both scale. And for the most part you'll be okay leaving it set
to scale. I'll quickly mention some of the other properties--width, over here on the
left. This specifies how wide or narrow your column will be, or sorry, how wide or narrow
the entries can be if you're dealing with string variables. Which we're not, so we can
just forget about that. Decimals specifies how many decimal places we'll show. Column,
that's what specifies how wide or narrow your columns will be in data view. I find it kind
of redundant though because you can just modify that in data view with your cursor, just moving
it around like that, so not too necessary. Align right here, it just left justifies,
right justifies, or center justifies the numbers in each cell of the spreadsheet in data view.
Just the same way that Excel or Microsoft Word would do. And for the most part I leave
the default. There are some other properties like values, and missing, which can be pretty
useful, there's also a role over here on the right. We'll get to those in later videos,
for now don't worry about them. So when you're dealing with SPSS, you're pretty much just
switching back and forth between variable view and data view. You can also get to variable
view from data view just by clicking on the variable name, it'll take you right back there,
and you can get back to data view by clicking on each row of the variable. So that's pretty
much the basics of SPSS in terms of at least navigating and what everything is. In the
next video we'll start plugging in numbers and running some calculations.