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Link to the last RSS article here: Statistics: a Clarification. - Ed. The State of SPSS @ UNTBy Patrick McLeod, Research and Statistical Support Services ConsultantAt the end of January 2009, Academic Computing Services will end our support for SPSS 15 for Windows. SPSS 15 has been our standard for SPSS support for the last year for faculty, staff and lab users.
With SPSS’ policy of offering support for the current version of their software and one version prior to the current version, we will be moving onto a different support matrix effective for the Spring 2009 semester: SPSS 16 and SPSS 17.
As many of you know, there were significant issues with SPSS 16. In the professional opinion of RSS staff, it took two large patches before SPSS 16 was suitable for deployment. By the time these two patches had been rolled out by SPSS, it was no longer feasible for us to deploy SPSS 16 on a wide scale. While there are some individual users of SPSS 16, the campus-wide standard has remained at SPSS 15 due to the number of issues that needed to be addressed with SPSS 16 over the last year.
In the next two weeks, we expect to receive and being production testing on SPSS 17. You can read more about SPSS 17’s capabilities here (link to http://www.spss.com/statistics/ ). The early reviews on SPSS 17 are that it fixes many of the out-of-the-box issues that were problematic with SPSS 16 and adds several new features that enhance its usability, like a new syntax editor that highlights different commands , subcommands and keywords. Our goal at RSS is to throw the kitchen sink at SPSS 17 to ensure that it is robust and, if it successfully passes our tests, roll it out campus-wide for support for Spring 2009. This will include running a Sentinel LM license server so that SPSS 17 can be offered as the campus-wide standard for computer labs. If we find the kind of problems that we did with SPSS 16, we will roll out the fully-patched SPSS 16 for campus-wide use for Spring 2009. We do not expect any major changes to the SPSS products that we license for SPSS version 17. These products are:
We have received quite a bit of interest in SPSS’ structural equation modeling product AMOS in the last two years. We are investigating the cost and the logistics of adding AMOS to our existing SPSS license. Adding AMOS to our license is a tricky proposition due to the price of it (it runs to several thousand dollars for a handful of “seats” (licenses)) and the logistics of how we would deploy it given that we know we cannot afford to add it as an enterprise product. For anyone who has worked with AMOS for structural equation modeling at another institution, we do support the structural equation modeling package LISREL as well as the statistical platform SAS which also has structural equation modeling capabilities via PROC Calis. Hopefully in time for Benchmarks Online publication next month, I will be reporting to you that SPSS 17 will be our standard for campus-wide use. That would be something we could all be thankful for and something that could get the holidays started off on the right foot! Until next time, happy computing!
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