SPSS For You

PREFACE

Statistics has its applications in diversified fields and it is rather impossible to see any field where statistics does not creep in. Owing to the importance of statistics, this subject has become a part of the general curriculum of many academic and professional courses.In olden days, researchers spent months in completing a statistical task manually.With the advent of computers, a few programs were made available to analyse statistical data.

SPSS,earlier termed as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is one of the oldest statistical programs on the market, which was originally written for mainframe computers and designed to be used in the social sciences, hence the name.Nowadays, this package is used by researchers from every discipline as the software contains powerful tools for automated analysis of data.

Our experience of more than two and a half decades of teaching SPSS from the earlier version to the latest version, our practical experience in guiding researchers in their statistical analyses and our experience in conducting courses in SPSS in various institutions gave us the interest and confidence to write this self-study book on SPSS.

The scope of this book is to introduce the reader to the SPSS for Windows and to enable them enter and format data, run the analysis, draw different kinds of diagrams and graphs and interpret data.This book is prepared for use in the teaching of statistics in colleges and for those who work independently in research, for analysis and interpretation of data.

This book is written in a simple systematic way. The subject matter is arranged in chapters and sections, numbered by the conventional decimal numbering system. All chapters have been written like a tutorial. Each chapter has instructions that guide the learner through a series of exercises, as well as graphics showing how the screen should look like at various steps in the process.

This book has nine chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief account of statistical data, sample and population and the basics of hypothesis testing.The rest of the chapters contain chapter-specific materials with exercises.Chapter 4 exclusively deals with a versatile way of producing graphs such as clustered bar chart with error bars with the aid of Chart builder and Interactive graphs. Chapters on comparing averages, analysis of variance, correlation, regression and chi-square are written in a very simple way with specific examples, to enable the reader to understand the concept and carry out the analysis easily, and interpret the results.

Throughout the book,we have used screen snapshots of SPSS Data Editor with Variable view and Data view, Dialog boxes and Outputs to illustrate finer aspects of the technique.The revision exercises are chapter-specific to enable the novice to have a personal hands-on training. We have also included a glossary for easy reference.

We would like to thank the faculty and the research scholars who approached us to have some clarification on the choice of the statistical test, running the analysis and interpreting data.

We are grateful to the authors of various books on SPSS which we have referred towhile writing this book, especially Andy Field who has authored Discovering Statistics using SPSS, for the topics on ‘Matched-Pairs Signed Rank test and Mann–Whitney’s test”.

We are grateful to Prof. P. Shanmugavadivel, Department of Statististics, St. Josephs College,Tiruchirapalli, India, for his spontaneous help and for his valuable comments. Finally,we would like to thank Mr. C. Sajeesh Kumar, Managing Editor, MJP Publishers, Chennai,for scrutinizing the manuscript with perfection, and for his valuable suggestions.

We hope that this book will be of great help to the readers in carrying out analysis with SPSS. If you would like to make suggestions, correct errors, or give us feedback, you are most welcome.

Please send your suggestions and criticisms to c_rajathi@yahoo.com,to enable us to improve the contents in the next editions.

ISBN: 978-81-8094-108-5

All rights reserved

Copyright MJP Publishers, 2006

Publisher : C. Janarthanan

MJP Publishers

5 Muthu Kalathy Street,

Triplicane,

Chennai 600 005

Tamilnadu India

Branches: New Delhi, Tirunelveli

This book has been published in good faith that the work of the author is original. All efforts have been taken to make the material error-free. However, the author and publisher disclaim responsibility for any inadvertent errors.

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