Using SPSS for Windows: Data Analysis and Graphics

By Susan B. Gerber and Kristin Voelkl Finn

This book is a self-teaching guide to the SPSS for Windows computer application. It is designed to be used with SPSS version 13.0, although many of the procedures are also applicable to earlier versions of SPSS. The step-by-step format of this manual "walks" the reader through numerous examples, illustrating how to use the application. The results produced in SPSS are shown and discussed in most examples. Each chapter demonstrates statistical procedures and provides exercises to reinforce the text examples. This book may be used in two ways - as a stand-alone manual for a student learning to use SPSS for Windows or in a course together with a basic statistics text. As a stand-alone manual, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basic ideas of quantitative data and statistical analysis. Thus, statistical terminology is used without providing extensive definitions. Most of the applications in this book are self-explanatory, although the reader will need to refer to a text for extensive discussion of statistical theory and procedures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387400834
• ISBN13: 9780387400839
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

detailed into to SPSS 13 for novices, but getting tutorial files requires time

This book is an introduction to SPSS 13 for beginners, which explains how to perform certain common operations step by step through hands-on exercises. The following topics are covered - user interface of SPSS, descriptive statistics (plots, medians, ranges, deviations), probability, inferential statistics, ANOVA, and exploratory factor analysis. Since the book is rather thin (193 pages of text + appendices), it goes through every topic quickly, which may be both good and bad depending on how much you want to learn and how much time you have... The book is very detailed when it deals with description of the software, but it does require certain basic knowledge of statistics. The author does not even attempt to explain the statistical concepts used in the book. If you do not know what all these words mean, you are out of luck. I, for instance, know some basics and made it through the first half of the book in one day, but was totally lost when I got to chapter 10 where two-tailed tests, null hypotheses, etc., were introduced What I found frustrating is that getting tutorial files requires a lot of work. About a third of them can be downloaded from Springer's web site in one package. The rest has to be downloaded individually, each file from its own web site, using URLs from the Appendix A. Many of them open as ASCII text in your web browser, after which you have to copy the data, paste into a text file, save it, then import in SPSS... Was it so difficult to combine them all in one convenient package, or use the same data file over and over again? I also suspect that some of the data which come from the web sites of scientific journals may require paid subscription, either individual or through the company/university, to access the files. I actually read half of the book, skipping the examples which were not included into the Springer package, before I realized that instructions where to find them were in the Appendix A. The author did not care to expain in the beginning that this is where one should look for instructions where to find them. Very frustrating. To make things worse, some of the files (such as war.sav) are neither included in Springer package, nor there is a link to them in the Appendix A. The good part is that each chapter ends with 4-5 simple exercises based on what was discussed in the text. Summary: acceptable book for a beginner with some background in statistics, works well for a quick introduction, contains many hands-on exercises which are well described (but getting tutorial files from the web one at a time requires work). Since it covers only the basics, only selected options and capabilities of the SPSS package are presented. Not surprisingly, it does not contain enough reference information to substitute the manual.