Welcome to this introduction to using SPSS. I'm going to begin by showing you
around the SPSS workspace. If you're already familiar with Microsoft Excel,
you'll notice that the basic appearance of SPSS is similar to Excel. So for this
exercise, I'm going to teach you how to open a new data set, create variables,
enter data, and then save that data set. Now this is something you will be doing
in almost every SPSS session, so these are important skills for you to master.
Now before I begin, I want to assure you that this is an introduction to SPSS for
absolute beginners. I assume that you have absolutely no knowledge of SPSS,
you've never used the program before, and this is your first time exploring it. Now
in future videos, I'll go into depth on tricks, shortcuts, features but in these
introductory videos, we're going to start at the very beginning, a very good place
to start. I do assume however that you are familiar with how to use a computer.
I assume that you know how to use either a Mac or a PC, now I'll be using Mac for
the most part. I assume that you know how to open a program or an application on
your computer I assume that you know how to use a keyboard to type letters and
numbers. I assume that you know how to use a mouse so you can navigate, and you
know how to left-click and right-click. If you're using a Mac with a single
click mouse, or a trackpad, the equivalent to right-clicking is to hold down the
control key when you click, and of course I assume that you have the software
already installed on your computer. Those are the basic skills that you need, so
with that as background, open the SPSS program on your computer, and let's get
started.
If the icon for SPSS is already on your desktop or in the dock,
click it to open SPSS. Alternatively, on a PC you can choose start > all programs > IBM
SPSS statistics > IBM SPSS statistics 23 or other version if you have it
installed. On the Macintosh, you can click through Applications > IBM > SPSS > Statistics
21 or other number > SPSS statistics. When you open SPSS you will be greeted with a
splash page. This is a picture that appears when you open a software program
as the program is loading, depending on your computer and the version of SPSS, you
may get a warning about unicode character encoding. If so, just click on
use unicode encoding, and that should be the only time that you see that notice.
When SPSS loads, the splash page disappears, and then you will see a
dialog box that offers shortcuts to various tasks that you might like to
perform, such as opening an existing data source, typing in data or opening another
type of file. Your dialog box may look different, however the menu items will be
the same. You may choose to use this initial dialog box as you get more
comfortable with SPSS, but I'm not going to teach you about it now. This page only
appears when you first open the program therefore if you're already using the
program you need to know where to find these options. I prefer to show you how
to find and use the options within the program itself. So click "cancel" and we
can get started. The program opens with a blank data set consisting of white boxes.
Those boxes are cells where you will type data they are organized into rows
and columns. The columns are vertical, they run up and down, like the columns of
a Greek temple. Each column represents a
variable. If you are measuring height, weight, and intelligence, you will have
one column for height scores, one for weight scores, and one for IQ scores. If
you create a new variable for body mass index, you will calculate a whole new
variable in its own column. The rows run horizontally. Rows represent cases or
participants. Each participant in your study will have his or her own data in a
single row. You never want a single participants data on multiple rows. We
are looking here at the data view. You know this because if you look at the
bottom of the screen, you will see a tab labeled "data view." This view is where you
enter data, but you will also see another tab called variable view. Now click on
that tab. Here we are in variable view. This is where you will define variables,
and this is an important difference between the way that SPSS and Excel
handles data. In Excel, you can have multiple worksheets. Now each worksheet
is like the page in a flip pad. You can flip from one worksheet to the other;
they're on top of each other, and there's different data on each one. You can add
new worksheets, or copy, or delete or enter data on any of them. In SPSS
however, you only have one worksheet or data set in which you enter data. If you
bring data into SPSS from Excel, and the data are on multiple worksheets, you
would need to create a new SPSS data set for each sheet of Excel data, and by the
way, this is usually a bad idea. You want all of your data on a single Excel
spreadsheet. Unlike Excel SPSS has a view in which
you define the characteristics of your variable in the variable view, and then
you enter the actual numeric data in data view. Click back to data view, and
let's enter some numbers. In this first column, let's enter 5 4 6 2
4 1. Now you may have already noticed some changes. These changes will be even
more obvious when you go back to variable view. There is new information
about the variable. These are the default settings, so let's learn about them. The
first column is name, and that is the name of the variable. The name of this
variable is var00001, which is a horrible name for a variable. We can do
much better. Rename this variable "scores". In fact, we can create new variables
simply by typing a name. In the second row, let's type "height". A new variable
appears. Now go back to data view and you can see that you have a new place to
enter data about height. Now back to variable view. The second column is type.
We have a lot of options here, and these will be important, so let me tell you
more about the types of variables in SPSS. The most common type of variable in
SPSS is numeric. These are numbers. They can be whole numbers, decimals single
digits, integers, Fibonacci numbers, anything, as long as it is a number. Only
the values 0 through 9 in any combination plus decimal points go in
numeric variables, no letters, no spaces, no commas, and no special characters. The
second type of variable is a string variable. String variables can include
numbers, but what makes a variable a string variable is that it has at least
one value somewhere that contains a letter, any letter anywhere, and the whole
variable is string. And of course there will be times when you do want to use
words or names, so if you wanted to list all of the cars that you own and one of
them is a yellow 1975 AMC Pacer. You would have a numeric variable for
year, 1975, and a string variable for yellow, and another string variable for
pacer. You know the AMC Pacer is one of the ugliest cars ever made. It looks like
a fishbowl on wheels. However, string variables cannot be
analyzed like numeric variables, so if you are going to use categorical
variables like male and female, yellow-red-blue, you can make them
numeric. You simply assign them a number like 1 equals male and 2 equals female,
or 1 equals yellow, 2 equals red, 3 equals blue. Other options available for
variable types are date with multiple options for specifying the year, month,
day or hour, minute, second, and scientific notation, if you were using very small or
very large numbers, what you should remember is that numeric variables are
your friends, and you should avoid string currency, date, and other variables unless
you really need them and you know what you're doing. We will use numeric
variables almost exclusively. So let's go back to variable view. The variable
settings that you will use the most are name - for creating a new variable,
decimal - for setting the number of decimals that appear in data view, label,
values, and measure. I will explain those settings in detail in a video about
creating variables. The settings that you will not use very much are width - which
you use to establish how wide or narrow the entries can be for string variables,
column - which is used to establish how wide or narrow the column will be in
data view, align - which is used to format your entries as left, right, or center
(this is done automatically) and missing - by which you instruct SPSS on how to
handle missing values. Now these these settings can be important at other times,
but these are not the ones that we'll be using the most.
Notice that column is by default set to the value of 8. So let's go back to data
view. You can adjust column widths with your cursor and then when you go back to
variable view, the column value will have changed.
Okay, that's your introduction to the SPSS workspace. Next time we're going to
create some variables that can be used for analysis.