As the old saying goes, there's more than one way to pet a cat, and there's more
than one way to construct a graph in SPSS. One way is using the chart builder,
and that is what we're going to learn about today, as we learn about making
graphs and figures using SPSS. We get to the SPSS chart builder by using the
drop-down menu > graphs > chart builder. Now the first time that you use SPSS chart
builder, you may see this warning box. Feel free to read it, or ignore it, but
whatever you do, click on the box that says don't show this dialogue again. Then
click OK, and we can get started. So this is the SPSS chart builder. This is where
all of the chart building will be done. So before we dive in, let me give you an
overview of this dialog box, and how we are going to use it. This dialog box may
look slightly different because I have already started working in it. By the way
the data set, that I have open here is clickers.sav, and I will be
introducing you to this data set in a moment. So first let me familiarize you
with the areas of the chart builder that you will want to know about, and let's
start down here in the gallery. The gallery is where you choose the type of
graph that you want to create. For instance bar graphs, or scatter plots,
histograms, or box plots. Once you have chosen your test, you will see the
options available for that type of test in the chooser. Now in this example, I've
chosen a simple bar chart. There are eight types of charts available in the
bar gallery. You can use the mouse to hover your cursor over any of the icons
to show its name. So to create a simple bar chart, I will drag the simple bar
icon up into the canvas. This will cause the canvas to change appearance. The
canvas is where a preview of sorts will display as i'm setting up a graph.
This is not a true preview, and the graph that you see in the canvas will not look
like your final graph. If you're seated next to someone in the computer lab, your
canvas will not look like their canvas, even if you do exactly the same steps
with the same variable at the same time. It's not a problem. Now here in the upper
right, we have all of the variables in the variable box. Right now, we're looking
at variable names. If you want to see the variable label, right-click on any of
the variable names, and choose display variable labels. In the canvas, we have two
drop zones for the x and y axis. I can drag variables from the variables box to
the x-axis drop zone or the y axis drop zone. Some drop zones will accommodate
dropping more than one variable when doing repeated measures graphs. Finally,
we can tweak the settings of the resulting graph in the element
properties. For instance, we can add labels to the X or Y axis, or decide
whether to report a mean or a percentage. So those are the basics of the chart
builder. Now let me tell you more about the data set that we will be using. The
data set that we will use for almost all of the graphing examples is called
clickers.sav. These are data collected by my colleague Dr. Kristen
Tifner that we published in a 2016 article for the journal Educational
Technology and Society about the use of clickers in improving education and
group discussions. The suffix .sav after "clickers" tells you that this is an
SPSS data set, and we will use a variety of the variables from this data set.
So here is the research design. Students were seated at tables during a seminar.
Three times during the seminar, students were asked to participate in a group
discussion, and then vote on an answer using their clicker. At some tables,
everyone at the table had his or her own clicker, now at other tables, the table
shared a single clicker, so the group had to vote on a group response. One of our
research questions was whether students who shared a single clicker with other
group members participated in an active exercise more or less than the students
who used individual clickers? Would having a shared clicker change the level
of student participation? Level of participation was measured among 166
seminar participants after each of three rounds of group interactions. Later,
students were asked whether they would prefer having an individual clicker.
Participation and preference for an individual clicker were both measured
using a Likert type rating scale with scores ranging from 1 to 7, where 7
equals high participation or high preference, and 1 equals low
participation in the group or low preference for an individual clicker. We
also asked about gender. We will use the clickers.sav dataset extensively as we
learn about graphing in SPSS. Go ahead and open the data set now in SPSS before
you continue through the rest of the videos.