SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences)
The SPSS software package was created for the management and statistical analysis of social science data. It was originally launched in 1968 by SPSS Inc., and was later acquired by IBM in 2009.
SPSS is used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government entities, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and many more for the processing and analyzing of survey data. Most top research agencies use SPSS to analyze survey data and mine text data so that they can get the most out of their research projects. SPSS is a powerful statistical software platform. It delivers a robust set of features that lets you extract actionable insights from its data.
With SPSS Statistics you can:
- Analyze and better understand your data, and solve complex business and research problems through a user friendly interface.
- Understand large and complex data sets quickly with advanced statistical procedures that help ensure high accuracy and quality decision making.
- Use extensions, Python and R programming language code to integrate with open source software.
- Select and manage your software easily, with flexible deployment options.
The Core Functions & Benefits of SPSS
SPSS offers four programs that assist researchers with their complex data analysis needs. It has following benefits:
- Easy to use: Perform powerful analysis and easily build visualizations and reports through a point-and-click interface, and without any coding experience.
- Efficient data conditioning: Reduce data preparation time by identifying invalid values, viewing patterns of missing data, and summarizing variable distributions.
- Quick and reliable: Analyze large data sets and prepare data in a single step with Automated Data Preparation.
- Comprehensive: Run advanced and descriptive statistics, regression and more with an integrated interface. Plus, you can automate common tasks through syntax.
- Open source integration: Enhance SPSS syntax with R and Python using a library of extensions or by building your own.
- Data security: Store files and data on your computer rather than in the cloud with SPSS that’s installed locally.
Statistics Program
SPSS’s Statistics program provides a plethora of basic statistical functions, some of which include frequencies, cross tabulation, and bivariate statistics.
Modeler Program
SPSS’s Modeler program enables researchers to build and validate predictive models using advanced statistical procedures.
Text Analytics for Surveys Program
SPSS’s Text Analytics for Surveys program helps survey administrators uncover powerful insights from responses to open ended survey questions.
Visualization Designer
SPSS’s Visualization Designer program allows researchers to use their data to create a wide variety of visuals like density charts and radial boxplots with ease.
In addition to the four programs mentioned above, SPSS also provides solutions for data management, which allow researchers to perform case selection, create derived data, and perform file reshaping.
SPSS also offers the feature solution of data documentation, which allows researchers to store a metadata dictionary. This metadata dictionary acts as a centralized repository of information pertaining to data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format.
There are a handful of statistical methods that can be leveraged in SPSS, including:
Descriptive statistics, including methodologies such as frequencies, cross tabulation, and descriptive ratio statistics. Bivariate statistics, including methodologies such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), means, correlation, and nonparametric tests. Numeral outcome prediction such as linear regression. Prediction for identifying groups, including methodologies such as cluster analysis and factor analysis.
The Benefits of Using SPSS for Survey Data Analysis
Thanks to its emphasis on analyzing statistical data, SPSS is an extremely powerful tool for manipulating and deciphering survey data.
Fun fact: The data from Microsoft Excel can be exported to SPSS for detailed analysis. Exporting survey data to SPSS’s proprietary. SAV format makes the process of pulling, manipulating, and analyzing data clean and easy.
By doing so, SPSS will automatically set up and import designated variable names, variable types, titles, and value labels, meaning that minimal legwork is required from researchers. Once survey data is exported to SPSS, the opportunities for statistical analysis are practically endless.
In short, remember to use SPSS when you need a flexible, customizable way to get super granular on even the most complex data sets. This gives you, the researcher, more time to do what you do best and identify trends, develop predictive models, and draw informed conclusions.
ABOUT PROGRAMME
SPSS is vast and versatile tool. To make it simple and understandable to learners we have divided the SPSS- Statistics into three programs: Basic, Intermediate and Advance.
Basic level mainly deals with know how about SPSS, Descriptive analysis etc., Intermediate deals with basic and advance Hypothesis testing and advance level deals with Multivariate techniques. A learner has flexibility of choosing levels where they wish to enroll. However, it is advisable from our side that in order to understand the whole concepts in totality, one must go for all levels.
All concepts will have practical orientation. Instructor will use cases extensively to explain the tool and real world applicability. After taking this program learner should be able to understand a business problem, convert them into a/ set of research problem/ s, will be able to design a questionnaire, gather data, analyse it with appropriate tool and report in a right way.