SPSS Statistics For Dummies, 4th 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. You 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, select options in the menus, and produce brilliant statistics. And interpret them properly, too! It really is as simple as that.

About This Book

Some sections of the book are written as stand-alone tutorials to make it easy for you to get into whatever you’re after. After you’re up and running with SPSS, you can skip around and read just the sections you need. You really don’t need to read straight through the entire book. However, the book's chapters are organized in parts, and it's generally a good idea to read the chapters in a part in sequence. And you should start with Part 1 if you are brand new to SPSS.

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. You can avoid all of those fancy formulas with lots of sigmas in them 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 ...