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One-way Repeated Measures and Corresponding Multiple Comparisons using
SPSS and R - Ed.
Using Report in SPSS 11.5, Part 1 of 2
By Patrick
McLeod, Research and Statistical Support Services Consultant
With the
decommissioning of the academic mainframe now a reality
after many months of diligent planning, certain processes that used to run on
the academic mainframe are now being transitioned to desktop processing. One of
these processes is the running of faculty evaluations, a process that is being
transitioned from a proprietary mainframe program to desktop processing using SPSS 11.5 for Windows. In the first part of a two-part article on using the
functionality of the Report tool in SPSS 11.5 for processing faculty
evaluations, we will discuss the basics of Report and how to set up a simple
report using both the drop-down menus and syntax.
Since faculty evaluations are sensitive affairs, I will not
be discussing this new SPSS-generated report in step-by-step detail. However,
we will go through the report-generation process with a similar report using
some similar methods. Since the faculty evaluations also contain sensitive
data, all data used in these two articles is generic data found in the SPSS
home directory, from a file called Employee Data.
From the Help menu, Syntax Guide, Base Syntax, in SPSS 11.5,
a description of the Report tool:
REPORT produces case listings and summary statistics and gives you considerable
control over the appearance of the output. REPORT calculates all
the univariate statistics available in DESCRIPTIVES and the
statistics and subpopulation means available in MEANS. In
addition, REPORT calculates statistics not directly available in any
other procedure, such as computations involving aggregated statistics. REPORT provides complete report format defaults but also lets you customize a
variety of table elements, including column widths, titles, footnotes, and
spacing. Because REPORT is so flexible and the output has so many components,
it is often efficient to preview report output using a small number of cases
until you find the format that best suits your needs.
Report is a very extensible, quite powerful tool in SPSS 11.5 that
is often overlooked by many in the university research community who are more
focused on the other specific statistical analyses offered in SPSS. However,
for the university administrative community, Report offers nearly unlimited
potential for customized reports by administrative groups from their desktops
instead of relying on the mainframe for such report generation.
Drop-Down Menus and Syntax
To begin utilizing the power of the Report
tool in SPSS 11.5, we should begin the discussion with a brief digression about
merits of drop-down menus (also known a the GUI, or Graphical User Interface)
versus syntax. The widespread advent of drop-down menu functionality in
statistical packages allows the user to point-and-click his or her way through
the basic levels of most statistical functions in the most recent versions of
SPSS, S-Plus, and Stata. While ease of use is a crucial function of any
statistical package, most researchers will find that the “canned” nature of drop-down
implemented models and tests are not sufficient for their research needs. Where
the functionality of drop-down menus ends, the functionality of syntax begins.
Syntax, or the programmable language of a statistical package, allows the user
to customize most or all of the functions of that statistical package to fit
the needs of their research.
Happily SPSS 11.5 allows the user who isn’t
comfortable with syntax but needs the extensibility it offers a way out. In
nearly every dialog box that opens up whenever a particular analysis is run in
SPSS, there will be an option for “PASTE” located on the right-hand side of the
dialog box. Here’s an example (screenshot 1):
The button for “PASTE” is located immediately
below the “OK” button. By clicking on “PASTE,” SPSS will paste the appropriate
syntax into a syntax editor window! The syntax will reflect all customizations
that have been selected in the particular dialog box for a particular type of
analysis. For example, in the picture above, any customizations the user
requested from SPSS under the “STATISTICS” and “OPTIONS” selections would be
reflected in the syntax that SPSS will paste into the syntax editor. If you
utilize this option, you will need to run your analysis from within the syntax
editor.
A Simple Report
In this section we will look at a simple
report generated from our example data. We will generate simple case summaries
with mean and range statistics by using the combined power of the drop-down
menu system and syntax.
First, we click on Analyze, then Report, then
across to Case Summaries (screenshot 2):
Next, we select our variables to be reported
in our case summaries (screenshot 3) and the statistics (screenshot 4):
After we have selected the variables to be reported in the
case summaries and the statistics, when then paste the syntax as discussed
above:
After pasting, we highlight the syntax and run the routine,
producing the following output:
In Part 2 of this article appearing next month in Benchmarks
we will customize this report’s layout and reported statistics using the syntax
output from Part 1. Happy computing!
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