IBM SPSS Essentials, 2nd Edition

Preface

This book represents a summarized compilation of problem‐solving successes that we collectively gleaned while working for various academic and private organizations. These are all institutions at which we've held jobs and at which at least a portion of our duties included minimizing errors in various applications (including SPSS).

This is a “how to” book. We present a system for using a software program known by the ubiquitous anagram: SPSS. You are not expected to know anything about SPSS at the beginning of the book – however, by the time you get to the end of the book, you are expected to know enough about SPSS to comfortably use the program. The intended audience of this second edition is undergraduate students who are learning SPSS in classroom environments (whether the delivery of the class content is “in person” or online). This differs in focus from the first edition, which was intended to be a bookshelf reference – a guide for practitioners who are using SPSS with real‐world data (which is almost always “messy”). The information found in this book should not become outdated with future versions of SPSS – the basic premise will be useful with SPSS version ∞.

Regardless of slight shifting of organization and emphasis, the purpose of both versions of this book is to teach you how you should use SPSS. The goal throughout is to minimize errors. Errors can occur in data entry, analysis interpretation, and even the choice of which dataset to use for analysis. This ...