Introduction
Good news! You don't have to know diddly-squat about statistics to be able to come up with well-calculated conclusions and display them in fancy graphs. All you need is the IBM SPSS Statistics software and a bunch of numbers. This book shows you how to type the numbers, click options in the menus, and produce brilliant statistics. It really is as simple as that.
About This Book
This is fundamentally a reference book. Parts of the book are written as standalone tutorials to make it easy for you to get into whatever you're after. Once you're up and running with SPSS, you can skip around and read just the sections you need. You really don't want to read straight through the entire book. That way leads to boredom. I know — I went straight through everything to write the book, and believe me, you don't want to do that.
The book was designed to be used as follows:
Read the opening chapter so you'll understand what SPSS is. I tried to leave out the boring parts.
If SPSS is not already installed, you may need to read about installing it. That's Chapter 2.
Read the stuff in Chapter 4 about defining variables and entering data. It all makes sense once you get the hang of it, but the process seems kind of screwy until you see how it works.
Skip around to find the things you want to do.
I would mention that you could skip the introduction, but it's too late for that. Besides, you may find some information here that could be useful.
One thing that needs to be clear from the beginning: This ...
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