SPSS for Data Analysis - Part 1

SPSS for DATA ANALYSIS – PART 1

In this blog, I will be introducing you to IBM SPSS software for data analysis. It is a series of blogs that opens you up to data analytics using one of the interesting applications designed specifically for data analysis – IBM SPSS (Figure 1).

SPSS stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. SPSS was acquired by IBM (International Business Machine) in 2009 and became IBM SPSS.

In this article, IBM SPSS version 25 is used for the illustrations and Figure 1 shows the “About” of the software. The tutor assumes you have IBM SPSS installed in your machine already and no guidelines is given on how to install the application in this blog.

Let’s get started!

Opening SPSS

It must be noted that SPSS startup procedures differs and this is a function of the configuration of your machine. That is, how SPSS appears on my machine which is Windows version SPSS may be different from how it appears on MacOS etc. Hence, this article uses screenshots of SPSS on a Windows machine.

When you open SPSS, you may be greeted by the dialog box above (Figure 2). The dialog box shows the recent works which makes continuation of any of them easier. Additionally, “What’s New” feature is also on the dialog box. But guess what! I often close the window immediately it comes up!

When you close the “Welcome window” you will be left with two windows: “Data Editor (Figure 3)” and “Output window (Figure 4).”

Data Entering

One of the things you should know while learning how to use SPSS is how it stores and uses data you supplied. There are two ways in which you can get data into SPSS: 1) manual data entry; and 2) data importation. The former requires you to enter the data into the spaces provided in the boxes in Figure 3 while in the later, already defined data with variable names are imported with little modifications. In this work, I will be entering data manually for the start and real dataset will be used later for analysis.

In the Data Editor window, there are two view modes: Data View and Variable View (see Figure 5). Data view is basically a spreadsheet with rows and columns. While variable view is used for the data properties modification. When you input data, default properties will be assigned which might not be correct, so, this can be corrected in the variable view mode. Just click any of the view and you have the view ready to be used.

By clicking the variable, entering the variable names which are age, weight and height, SPSS automatically assign default properties to the variables (see Figure 6) and when switched back to the Data View it places the variables in the columns side, ready to accept data (in rows).

We must first enter some fundamental information about each variable into SPSS before we can enter any data. Variables, for example, must have names that start with a letter and do not contain a space. As a result, the variable name "M4" is permitted, however "4M" is not. In the same way, the variable name "FIRST DATA" is permitted, but "FIRST DATA" is not.

SPSS allows you to add and edit all of the variables in your data file from the Variable View page (Figure 6). Each row represents a variable, and each column represents a variable's property. A name must be supplied to each variable. To do so, go to the Name column's first empty cell and type a valid SPSS variable name. Most of the other properties will be filled in with default values by the application (see Figure 6).

Figure 7 shows the Data view where the values for each variable can be entered. See Figure 8 for the entered values for variable “age.” Automatically, two decimal places were assigned to each of the value entered. This is because the application assigned “2” to variable “age” under “Decimals” property. This can be changed to any number or even zero by simply clicking “Decimals” column and enter the desired decimal place.

There are several other options to be explored in Variable View which might be referring back to as we progress in the learning. But most importantly, the best way to capture what SPSS has to offer for your data analysis journey is to PRACTICE. Attempt what we don’t cover in a blog and kindly drop your comment for any clarification.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have introduced basics of SPSS such as its views, opening SPSS, data entering, and defining variable. In the next blog, we shall be starting data analysis fully using a real dataset.

Next: SPSS for DATA ANALYSIS – PART 2