 SPSS
Though most of its advancements over the past decade or so have
been geared toward corporate and marketing interests and needs, SPSS is still
widely used for social science research as well as other disciplines. Its greatest asset,
and one might argue its only strength relative to the other general
purpose packages we support, is a user interface that makes
it easy to perform analyses, some even quite complex (though all
major stat packages have some graphical user interface these days).
However, by focusing on the menu approach SPSS has greater inflexibility
compared to other packages,
which is coupled with a lack of modernization of the techniques now
available to academic researchers.
That said all three of the RSS group have extensive experience with
SPSS and are ready to help you with your research needs should you
decide to use it. In general, SPSS can perhaps be seen as a
decent package to start with given its
graphical user interface, but for the sort of sophisticated techniques
that go beyond simple exploration of data, a thorough attempt will
often likely require you to use or at the very least supplement with
something else.
Right now we support versions 15 and 16, though currently it is our
collective opinion to not recommend the latter if you already have a
functioning copy. SPSS released version 16 in a tremendously
buggy state, and despite fixing over one hundred known bugs with
subsequent patches, there are still problems for those that use it
extensively.
With version 14, SPSS began using other means to supplement its
functionality, first starting with the ability to work with
Python. With 16 it now allows for usage of an entire
other statistical program, R. If you can use
either of those, odds are you probably wouldn't be using SPSS to
begin with for academic research, however if interested in learning
more, here is a zip file
summary.
Due to its popularity, there is a vast amount of information on
the web to get you started with SPSS, so we suggest you do some
Googling to see what's out there regarding your specific SPSS
situation as it's likely there is an answer available already.
SPSS Inc.: SPSS' website
Archives of SPSSX-L Discussion - SPSS Listserv. Discusses programming, statistics and analysis.
Macros, Scripts and more:
note that there is no formal testing of these, not that they haven't
been in some fashion, just that you use at your own risk.
SPSS Log: A blog regarding SPSS
Web link for
requesting support and/or appointments with RSS staff
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