Hello statistics students! If you have enjoyed these videos about Diving Deeper
into SPSS, but you still want to learn more, let me tell you about some
friends of mine from the UK who have some fantastic tutorials about SPSS.
The website is Laerd Statistics and I have found this website to be an ever-present
help in times of statistical trouble, and I recommend it to any researcher who
uses SPSS. Watch until the end of this video and I will tell you how to get
low-cost access to the entire site.
Let's say you're looking for some help with your linear regression in SPSS.
So you do what most people do: you ask the all-knowing internet for help. You will
probably find some great videos on the topic. Hey! There's one now! But it is
highly likely that no matter what SPSS test that you search for, you will find a
tutorial from Laerd Statistics. Now, this website has free tutorials that are
really good! They walk you through the test assumptions. They explain the
concepts and they show you exactly how to do the tests in SPSS. But there is
much more to this site. Let me take you behind the scenes and give you five
reasons why I recommend this site to any statistic student or researcher.
Full disclosure: this is not a paid endorsement, although I was given a
complimentary access to the website after I had already purchased a one-year
membership. Reason 1: Greatest Hits, Next Steps, and Deep Cuts
What types of SPSS tutorials can you find on the site? Here we have all of the
Greatest Hits: everything you need for introductory statistics. We have
independent and paired t-tests, correlation, linear regression, factorial
and repeated ANOVAs, and chi-square. All of the basics. But then we have the next
steps: alternative forms of correlation; multiple regression; one-, two-, and three-
way ANOVAs, repeated measures ANOVA, mixed ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, plus all of the
nonparametric alternatives. And then we have the deep cuts: you can learn
survival analysis, principal components analysis,
Cronbach's Alpha reliability, plus others like the McNemar's tests and the
Jonckheere-Terpstra test, which I have to admit, I'd not heard of before... but I know what it is now!
And then you have tutorials for creating charts and graphs in SPSS Chart Builder.
And each tutorial includes the same example data set that was used in
the tutorial, so that you can follow along with each step as you learn. And by
the way, many of these tutorials are available for Stata, as well...although you
can see that the choices are more limited.
Reason 2: Help Me Decide! Yes, there are nearly 100 SPSS tutorials available, but
that does you no good if you do not know which test that YOU need to use. Laerd
has a handy Statistical Test Selector to help you choose the appropriate
statistical test. Start by choosing your study design. Are you looking for
associations, or predictions, or looking for differences between groups? And then
you follow the prompts. In one of my other research projects, I'm using a
within-subjects design. Not sure about your design? Read about the various
options to help clarify and make sure that you select correctly. How many
independent variables am I using? I'll say "2". (If you are working on your
dissertation or any research proposal with this, will not help you clarify
your Chapter 1 description of your research design?!?) And what type of
dependent variable do I have? I'll go with Continuous. Click the button and
Laerd Statistics tells you precisely what tests you need. I need a two-way
repeated measures ANOVA... and now that I know that,
I can go directly to that guide.
Reason 3: Detailed Analysis! This example is about linear regression. Look
at the detail for this tutorial! Yes, the free tutorial was good, but look at this!
Every tutorial has a table of contents that describes all of the steps that
you're going to need to follow, and then it has a flowchart outlining the steps
and decisions that you will need to make along the way, and as I mentioned before,
you get an example data set, so that you can follow along with each of these
steps. Every tutorial shows you how to set up your data in SPSS, so that you can
run the appropriate test. You begin - as you should -
By checking assumptions for a test. Once you determine whether the assumptions have
been met, if you discover problems, you will be
told about your options for fixing them. Then you get the detailed procedure for
conducting the test in SPSS, with plenty of screenshots. If your test requires a
graph, that is explained too. When it is time to interpret and report the results,
Laerd Statistics explains the output sifting out the parts of the output that
you do not need and helping focus on what you do need.
Reason 4: Write it up! Here is something that most statistics textbooks neglect: how do you
write the results of your statistical test? I use APA style, so I click on this
option. This is how you might write up the significant findings for an
independent samples t-test, such as you might for a class project, but in this
example, all of the assumptions checks are mentioned... as well as the conclusions.
You can model your entire write-up on what you learn from these tutorials!
What kind of graph should I use to display my findings for my linear regression? I can
learn how to create the scatter plot. The problem here, however, is that this plot
is not in APA style... but I can learn how to change the appearance of the
scatterplot to be suitable for publication. Reason 5: Affordability!
Thank you for watching until the end. Remember that I promised
you that I would tell you how to get low-cost access to the Laird Statistics
site? Considering that any stats textbook is going to cost you $100 or more, and
that an SPSS subscription is $100 a month, you can imagine that access to all
of this content is going to be pretty expensive! But if you go to
statistics.Laird.com (link in the description below) and mention "Research by Design" YouTube
channel, you get six months of access for only $12.99! What is that in pounds? or
Euros? or Canadian dollars? AND... if you go to statistics.Laird.com (link in the
description below) and you DON'T mention the "Research by Design" YouTube channel,
you STILL get six months of access for $12.99...that is the regular price. I also
like that they did not do recurring charges. This site has helped me
immensely over the years, and I wanted to give back a little by telling other
people who are looking for statistical help. So those are my top five reasons
why I began using Laerd Statistics, and why I would recommend it to students who
want to learn SPSS or researchers who want to expand their skills.
...watch until the end of this video and I will tell you how to get low-cost access to the entire site.
Turns out, that's the same cost regardless... it's already like 12
bucks a month... lesson 12 top five workflow shortcuts in SPSS...