INTRODUCTION

TO SPSS

WISDOM MGOMEZULU
mgomezuluwisdom@yahoo.com
 Outline
• Introduction to SPSS
• Temperate designing for data entry
• Data entry
• Data cleaning
• Basic statistical analysis such as descriptive, hypothesis tests, modelling, etc

 Make sure you have SPSS installed in your computer

 Introduction to SPSS
 SPSS –Statistical Package for Social Scientists
o Computer program/software for carrying out statistical analyses
o Very powerful and user-friendly

 Nature of SPSS: three main windows

 Data editor window is used for entering, displaying and editing data.
- shows data in two forms
• Data view
• Variable view
 Output viewer for displaying results on an analysis or general sequence
of commands.
 Syntax editor window is used for typing and running SPSS commands.
 Introduction to SPSS
 *You must save the data editor window and output viewer window
separately.
 Make sure to save both if you want to save your changes in data or
analysis.*
 Introduction to SPSS ct’d

 Data view:
o Rows are cases
o Columns are variables

 Variable view:
o Rows define the variables
• Name, Type, Width, Decimals, Label, Missing, etc.
 Scale – age, weight, income
 Nominal – categories that cannot be ranked (ID number)
 Ordinal – categories that can be ranked (level of
satisfaction)
Opening SPSS
SPSS GUI-Variable view
Data view
 SPSS MENUS
 Gives you access to various functions in SPSS
 File menu -lets u open, save, print, export data, close and access
recently used files
 Edit-cut, copy, etc
 View-to customize SPSS desktop: hide/show tool bar, status bar, etc
 Data menu-data manipulation: sort cases, merge files, split file, etc
 Transform-compute new variables & make changes to existing ones
 Analyze-lets us perform all the statistical analysis
 Graph- to make plots from the data
 Utilities-Gives information about the variables and files
 Add-ons-tells us other prog of SPSS family
 Windows and help
Types of variables &
measurement
 Types of variables
 Quantitative -numeric in nature
 Qualitative-non numeric

 Levels of measurements
 Nominal-categorical e.g. gender, Religion, race, occupation, etc
 Ordinal : This is data ordered sequence. For example,
agreement (strongly agree, disagree) satisfaction (total
satisfaction, satisfied, dissatisfied), etc
 Interval or Ratio: -numbers go from low to high in equal
intervals. Height and weight- examples.
 Designing Template
 Variable view
 Rows define the variables
 Name, Type, Width, Decimals, Label, values, Missing, Columns, Align, Measure, etc
 Defining and naming variables
 Data can be of various types:
 Numeric*-variable whose values are numbers
 U cannot perform any statistical analysis if u define it as string
 String*-text format
 Date
 Comma
 Currency, etc
 Naming variables
 Avoid use of space-unrecognised character
 Designing Template
 Variable names are usually short forms e.g. hhage for “age of the household
head”, etc

 You can use under-score e.g. hh_edulevl for “education level of the household
head”

 A blank space and special SPSS characters like, +, /, -, *, !, ’, and ? can not be
used

 A variable name cannot be repeated for different columns

 Note: there is no defined rules for naming variables-depends on the

comfortability of the researcher.

 However, conventional short forms/symbols shud be considered

 Designing Template
 Width-specifies the length of the variable in characters

 Decimals-affect the display of the data in data view. Take note of sensitive
variables

 Label-details or description of the variable name. e.g. hh_id variable as

“household identification number”

 Values-assigning the values or codes for the variable

 For example:
 Gender: 1=male, 0=female
 Marital status: 1=married, 2=single, 3=divorced, 4=widow(er), etc
 Occupation: 1=farming, 2=employment, 3=busines, etc
 Designing Template
 Assigning values
 Click on the cell in the values column. A dialogue box will appear

 Gender for example: enter 1 for male in the box labeled “value” and
specify its name (male) in the box labeled “value label”

 This will activate the “add button” click the add button and repeat
the steps to specify for female

 The buttons “change” and “remove” are used when u have made
mistakes

 Note: The variable gender is qualitative but bcoz u have assigned the
Value labels-dialogue box
Designing template

 Missing values-to specify missing values when

coding data
 Specify certain values to variables for which the
respondent gave no responses
 Usually out-of-range values: 999, 9999, 99, 888, etc
 Why missing values?

 Measure-to specify whether your variable is scale,

nominal or ordinal
Defining missing values
Multiple response questions/variables

 Multiple response questions/variables

 Define each response as a separate variable
 Maintain the value labels for each variable
 Examples: World Vision questionnaire
 B11-Livelihood sources
 B13
 Ranking livelihood sources*

 Open ended questions (un coded questions)

 You can code them after data collection*
 Or type them as text
 A poorly designed template will give you problems!
 DATA ENTRY
 The data view is the mode that you enter your data
 Rows are cases
 The facilitator to demonstrate
 Columns are variables
 Missing values*
 Multiple response questions*
 Hands on using questionnaire
 Data cleaning/management
 Saving SPSS data file
 Click on File> Click Save As and give a file name>
Click Save
 DATA ANALYSIS-HANDS ON

 Opening an existing SPSS data file

 Click on File> Click Open> Click Data> Click File Name> Click
Open
 Summarizing data: Descriptive analysis
 Measures of central tendency: mean, median, mode-explore*
 Frequencies-categorical
 Tables
 Comparing means-(quantitative variables)
 One sample t-test
 Independent sample t-test
 Chi-square test (categorical variables)
Data Analysis

 Custom tables
 Modeling
 Reading SPSS output and interpretation
Descriptive analysis
Data Analysis-descriptive
Data Analysis

 Multiple response analysis

 Analyse-multiple response-define variable sets
 Categories, dichotomies, variable name, label, close
 Analyse immediately before you close

 Cross tabulation
 To describe the relationship between variables-nominal
 Analyse-descriptives-crosstabulation
 Chi-square analysis and interpretation
 Advanced data handling in SPSS

 Sorting cases
 Finding values, variables, cases
 Merging files
 Splitting files
 Selecting cases
 Recording values
 Transforming variables
Computing new variables
 Statistical Modelling
 Linear regression, logit and probit models
 Analyse-regression-linear/probit/logit
 Dependent variables, independent variables
 Diagnostic tests
 T-TEST
 There are tree types of T-test
1. Independent-samples t test (two-sample t test).
2. Paired-samples t test (dependent t test).
3. One-sample t test.
Independent-samples t test (two-sample t test).

 Compares the means of one variable for

two groups of cases.
 Descriptive statistics for each group and
Levene’s test for equality of variances are
provided, as well as both equal- and
unequal-variance t - values and a 95%-
confidence interval for the difference in
means.
Paired-samples t test (dependent t test).

 Compares the means of two variables for a

single group.
 This test is also for matched pairs or case-
control study designs.
 The output includes descriptive statistics for
the test variables, the correlation between
them, descriptive statistics for the paired
differences, the t test, and a 95%-confidence
interval.
One-sample t test.

 Compares the mean of one variable with a

known or hypothesized value.
 Descriptive statistics for the test variables
are displayed along with the t test. A 95%-
confidence interval for the difference
between the mean of the test variable and
the hypothesized test value is part of the
default output.
IT GETS BETTER WITH
PRACTICE (WIZ, 2018)
 THANK YOU