SPSS

• Recently it has gone through a name

change so your icon on your computer
may be under a different name (i.e.
PASW- Predictive Analytics SoftWare).
• IBM purchased the company and said they
are going to change the name to IBM-
SPSS or SPSS: An IBM Company

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 What is SPSS?
• Statistical software:
• Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
• There are lots of others
– SAS
– STATA
–R
– SHAZAM
– Specialized software
• HLM
• LISREL
• BUGS
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 Why SPSS?
• Although SPSS is not the most powerful
statistical software - It is the easiest to
learn and use!!!!!!
• It is very flexible and can do most
everything we need
• It can examine a large amount of data very
quickly
• It is competitively priced
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 Where to start?
• Get some data

• In practice you would develop a research

question first, a theory, hypotheses, etc.
before collecting and analyzing data

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 Sources of data
• ICPSR - http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/

• Free for universities that subscribe (UNLV

does)

• For now we have a dataset on our course

website and WebCampus

• http://faculty.unlv.edu/kfernandez/methods1.htm
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 General Social Survey
• NORC (National Opinion Research Center)
located at the University of Chicago
• Telephone survey since 1972
• Free to anyone
• http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/
• It is big so use the edited 2002 version
located on our course website

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 General Social Survey
• The dataset is huge with hundreds of
survey items (variables).
• The dataset we are using today has been
edited to include only 47 variables
• This is also an older dataset (sometime
after 1996).
• The NORC website has a free 2010
version if you are interested.
• This could be a dataset you use for your
research design assignment
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 The Basics
• This is a one level, rectangular dataset
• What do the rows represent?
• What do the columns represent?
• This dataset could be connected to other
datasets to create multiple-level datasets
• i.e. individual, state, country

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 First things first
• Setting the options will make life easier
– Go to the pull down menu “edit”
– Select “Options”
– Select the “General” tab at the top
– Under “Variable List” click Display Names and
Alphabetical
– Now select the “Output Labels” tab
– Make sure they all say Names and Labels or
Values and Labels
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 Lets get our feet wet
• Most tools will be under the “analyze” pull
down menu
• Select “Descriptive Statistics” and then
“Frequencies”
• Find the variable “Tvhours”. The list should
be alphabetical now. Move it to the
“Variables” box and click ok.
• What does this table mean?
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 Missing Data and Outliers
• Is there anything strange in any of the
responses?
• What about missing data?
• How many respondents didn’t answer the
question?
• NAP = Not Appropriate; NA = Not
Answered

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 Recoding
• Variables often need to be cleaned or
recoded so that they can be used in a
statistical model
• For example find the variable “income”
• Run a frequency
• There is a value that if not changed will
really mess up your analysis
• What is it and why is it a problem?
• What do we need to do?
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 Recoding
• Select the “Transform” pull down menu
• Click the recode into the same variable
• WARNING, WARNING
• Usually I choose the “recode into different
variable” because if you make a mistake
you will forever change that variable and
won’t be able to go back. Always have a
backup of your dataset that is untouched
so you can start over if you need to.

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 Recoding
• Select “income”
• Click “Old and New Values”
• In the Old Value type “24”
• In the new value select “System-Missing”
• Click “Add”
• Click “Continue”
• Now Click OK
• Rerun the frequency for income
• Now 23 is the highest value, not “refused”
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 The End
• Hand in homework #2
• Remember homework #3 is due Feb. 16

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