SPSS Statistics for Dummies, 3rd Edition

Introduction

Good news! You don’t have to know diddlysquat about the math behind statistics to be able to come up with well-calculated conclusions and display them in fancy graphs. We won’t be doing any calculations by hand. 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. And interpret them properly, too! It really is as simple as that.

About This Book

This is fundamentally a reference book. Parts of the book are written as stand-alone 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. We know — we went straight through everything to write the book, and believe us, you don’t want to do that.

This book is not about math. It’s about statistics. You don’t derive anything. You don’t do any math by hand or look up numbers in statistical tables. You won’t find one explanation of how calculations are performed under the hood. This book is about the things you can do to command SPSS to calculate statistics for you. The inside truth is that you can be as dumb as a post about statistical calculation techniques and still use SPSS to produce some nifty stats!

However, if you decide to study the techniques of statistical calculation, you’ll be able to understand ...