SPSS For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Some Analysis Examples

In This Chapter

• Comparing means

• Finding out how things match up with correlations

• Making predictions with regression testing

This chapter describes how to instruct SPSS to dig into your data, execute an analysis, and reach a conclusion. In SPSS, executing an analysis consists of taking in your raw data, performing calculations, and presenting the results in a table or a chart.

This chapter provides examples of the most fundamental types of analysis that SPSS offers. Any menu choices or options that I don't demonstrate here are more advanced forms of the same types of analysis. The more advanced forms often require that you set more options, and sometimes they require the selection of more variables from the dataset, but the process is always fundamentally the same as the examples described in this chapter. The advanced forms employ the same basic algorithms. In general, understanding how the analysis examples in this chapter operate will give you the understanding you need for the more advanced forms.

In the descriptions in this chapter, I assume you're familiar with the fundamental procedures required for constructing tables, which I describe in Chapter 12.

Comparison of Means Analyses

The tests for comparing the mean of one variable to the mean of another are more varied and flexible than you might think. The analysis methods in this section fall into the category of means tests, but they are actually more than that. You'll find that they can produce ...