An Introduction to JASP: A Free and User-Friendly

Statistics Package
James Bartlett

1 Introduction
1.1 What is JASP?
JASP is a free, open-source alternative to SPSS that allows you to perform both simple and
complex analyses in a user-friendly package. The aim is to allow you to conduct complex Classical
(stuff with p values) and Bayesian analyses ("What the hell is Bayesian statistics?" you might ask,
look in appendix 9.1 if you are interested), but have the advantage of a drag-and-drop interface
that is intuitive to use.

1.2 Why JASP?

Although many universities predominantly use SPSS, it is extremely expensive which means you
probably cannot use it unless you are affiliated with a university. JASP is a free, open-source
alternative that aims to give you a simple and user-friendly output, making it ideal for students
who are still getting to grips with data-analysis in psychology. Here are just a few benefits of using
JASP:

1.2.1 Effect sizes

Effect sizes are one of the most important values to report when analysing data. However, despite
many papers and an APA task force (...in 1999, no one ever listens) explaining their importance,
SPSS only offers a limited number of effect size options and many simple effect sizes are required
to be calculated manually. On the other hand, JASP allows you to simply tick a box to provide
an effect size for each test.

1.2.2 Continuously updated output

Imagine you have gone through all of the menus in SPSS to realise you forgot to click one option
that you wanted to be included in the output. You would have to go back through the menus and
select that one option and rerun the whole analysis, printing it below the first output. This looks
incredibly messy and takes a lot of time. In JASP, all of the options and results are presented on
the same screen. If you want another option to be presented, all you have to do is tick a box and
the results are updated in seconds.

1.2.3 Minimalist design

For each statistical test, SPSS provides every value you will ever need and more. This can be very
confusing when you are getting to grips with statistics and you can easily report the wrong value.
In JASP, the aim is minimalism. You start off with the bare bones result, and you have the option
to select additional information if and when you need it.

1.3 Using JASP

1.3.1 How to download JASP
Today, you will opening JASP through the software portal, but you can download it yourself for free
on their website for either Windows, OSX, or Linux (if that’s your thing). Installing it should be
pretty straightforward, just follow the instructions it provides you. After installing it and opening
the program, you will find the "Welcome to JASP" window shown in Figure 1.

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 Figure 1: JASP startup window

1.3.2 Entering data in JASP

The first difference you will find between SPSS and JASP is how you enter data. In SPSS, you
enter data manually through the data view screen. In JASP, there is currently no facility to enter
data directly (although this may change in future), and you have to load the data in a comma
separated values (.csv) file. This is like an Excel spreadsheet but you cannot directly load a normal
Excel Workbook (.xlsx), you first have to convert it to a .csv file. The data you will use today is
already in a .csv file so you will be able to load it directly. However, if you decide to use JASP in
your own time and need to create a .csv file, here is a useful link that explains what it is and how
to create one. If you have an SPSS data file and want to convert it to .csv, look in appendix 9.2
for further instructions.
To start any data analysis, we need to load some data to use. At the top of the "welcome"
window, there are two tabs: File and Common. Click on the File tab and you will see the window
in Figure 2. Here you will have your recently opened files on the right if you have used it before,
but yours should be blank the first time you use it. To open a file, click on Computer > Browse,
then select the data file from wherever you saved it on your computer. After it has loaded, the
"welcome" window will look slightly different as your data will be visible on the left side of the
window like in Figure 3.

1.3.3 Changing data types

The next step is to make sure JASP knows what type of data your variables are (e.g. nominal,
ordinal). Unlike SPSS, JASP does its best to guess what data type it is. The symbols at the top
of the columns in Figure 3 look like three circles for nominal data, three lines like a podium for
ordinal data, and a little ruler for scale data. Most of the time JASP gets it right and the columns
have the right symbol. However, sometimes it is not quite right. If you click on the symbol, you
can change it from one data type to another if things are not quite right.
Another difference between JASP and SPSS is how you define nominal factor levels. In SPSS,
you might remember that to define an independent groups factor such as nationality you need to
assign each level a value and label. For example, you could list the first participant as German
and label them with a 1, the second person could be Chinese and be assigned a 2. Every German
participant would be identified by the number 1, and every Chinese participant would be labeled 2
etc. However, in JASP you have the choice of using values as factor levels or using labels as factor

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 Figure 2: JASP file tab

levels. You just need to make sure the variable type is nominal (three little circles) at the top of
the column. An important thing to note is that if you use labels, all of them need to be exactly
the same to be considered the same condition throughout the dataset. For example, German could
not be spelled as german or GERMAN, or JASP would think these are three different conditions.
It has to be written exactly the same, capitals and spaces and everything.

2 Today’s session
The session is organised like the process you would normally go through when you perform data
analysis. You want to get a feel for the data through descriptive statistics and using some plots
to visualise the data. The next step is to make sure the type of analysis you want to perform is
appropriate for the data you have, so we will look at data screening. Finally, we will go ahead and
look at the inferential statistics. There are tasks listed throughout the guide. Make sure you have
the worksheet open to be able to write your answers down as you go along.
The data for all of the examples are from real published research and were made available on
the Open Stats Lab (McIntyre 2016). All the analyses you are going to perform are the same as
what was performed in the original research.

3 Example One: T-test

3.1 Study background
The first example that we are going to look at is from a study by Schroeder and Epley (2015). The
aim of the study was to investigate whether delivering a short speech to a potential employer would
be more effective at landing you a job than writing the speech down and the employer reading it
themselves. Thirty-nine professional recruiters were randomly assigned to receive a job application
speech as either a transcipt for them to read, or an audio recording of them reading the speech.
The recruiters then rated the applicants on perceived intellect, their impression of the application,
and whether they would recommend hiring the candidate. All ratings were on a likert scale ranging
from 0 (low intellect, impression etc.) to 10 (high impression, recommendation etc.).

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 Figure 3: JASP window with data

3.1.1 Task
1. What would your predictions be? As they are the same words, do you think the applicants
would be rated similarly, or do you think the audio recordings would result in higher ratings
due to additional indicators of intelligence? It is important to think about this first, so write
your prediction down briefly.

3.2 Descriptive statistics

3.2.1 Loading the data
Firstly, we need to open the data file for this example. Look back at section 1.3 on how to open
a .csv file and open Schroeder-Epley-data.csv from the folder you downloaded at the start of the
session. Your window should now look like Figure 3. The next thing to do is to make sure JASP
has correctly labeled each column. The variables we are interested in for the first example are
Condition, Intellect_Rating, Impression_Rating, and Hire_Rating. Condition is our independent
variable and indicates whether the participant has been provided with a transcript (value 0) or an
audio recording (value 1). It should be labeled as nominal data and have the three little circles
explained in section 1.3.3. The other three variables are our dependent variables and each should
be labeled as scale (a little ruler). Intellect_Rating and Impression_Rating are both identified
correctly. However, Hire_Rating may have been labeled as a nominal variable and needs changing
to scale. Click on the three circles and change it to a ruler.

3.2.2 Getting a first look at the data

From the window in Figure 3, click on the Descriptives tab (below file) > Descriptive Statistics
to find the new window in Figure 4. From here, we can take a look at the data by ticking the
box ’display boxplots’ and dragging all three of our dependent variables into the white box to the
right of the full list of variables. This will fill the table in the far right screen with the data for the
three dependent variables and provide you with three boxplots. However, this only provides you
with the descriptive statistics for the whole sample. This is not very informative as we had two
independent groups: one for those provided the transcripts, and one for those provided the audio
recordings. We can split the boxplots up into our two groups by dragging the Condition variable

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to the "split by (optional)" box. This divides each of the ratings into our two groups to provide
the plots shown in Figure 5.
Taking a look at each boxplot, we can see that when the participants were provided with audio
recordings, they provided higher ratings of intellect, impression, and recommendation than those
provided with just transcripts. Take a look and have a think whether this is consistent or not
with the predictions you made in section 3.1. However, somewhat annoyingly, you do not get the
descriptive statistics in the table divided by Condition (we will return to this in section 3.3.2).
However, given that it is free and it is still in development, we will cut them a bit of slack and it
will apparently be included in the next version release along with data editing capabilities. Follow
them on Twitter (@JASPStats) or Facebook (JASPStats) to stay up to date with their version
releases.

Figure 4: JASP window for descriptive statistics

3.3 Data screening

From the boxplots, we can see that the participants who listened to the audio recordings provided
higher ratings than those who just read the transcript. This is only a visual inspection and we
would ideally like to perform some inferential tests. However, before we go rushing to click some
buttons, we need to make sure the data is suitable for parametric tests. We want to compare two
independent groups (remember what the independent variable was), so we want there to be little
influence from outliers, we want to assume normality, and that the variances in both groups are
approximately equal.

3.3.1 Assessing outliers

The first thing we can do is look back at the boxplots we created in section 3.2.2. These figures
present the median as the central line, the first and third quartiles as the edges of the box, and
then 1.5 of the inter-quartile range above and below the box as lines. Values outside of these lines
are what can be considered outliers. In this example Intellect_Rating has a few outliers above and
below, but they do not seem to be particularly extreme (you could follow this up more formally
by assessing the scores after they have been converted to standardised values, but you cannot do
this in JASP. You would have to do this in SPSS.).

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 Figure 5: JASP window for boxplots and descriptive statistics

3.3.2 Assessing normal distribution and homogeneity of variance

The next thing to do is to check if the data appear to have been sampled from a normal distri-
bution, and whether the variances are approximately equal. This involves clicking on T-Tests >
Independent Samples T-Test to open a new menu below the list of variables and a blank analysis
table on the right of the screen. Note one of the nice features of JASP is that you do not have to
go back through the menus and click a range of options. The new analysis just appears below the
old one (which is now greyed out but still visible if you scroll up).
We can drag all of the dependent variables into the dependent variable box and drag Condition
into Grouping Variable. We now have a range of options to click and the temptation to start
looking at T-Tests is almost irresistible. All we have to do is look at a few more tables and then
we are ready to go. On the menu below the list of variables, click on Normality and Equality
of Variances under the Assumption Checks heading, and also click Descriptives under Additional
Statistics to get the descriptive statistics grouped by condition that we wanted in section 3.2.2.
You should now get something that looks like Figure 6. Another useful design feature in JASP is
that the tables are designed in APA style so that you can easily copy and paste them providing
the variables have appropriate names.
First, we will look at the Shapiro-Wilk test which assesses the assumption of normality. The
idea behind this is that the assumption of normality is the null hypothesis in the test. Therefore,
if you get p<.05, then the data do not come from a normal distribution and the assumption of
normality is violated. This test and a similar one called the Kolmogorov-Smirov test can also be
found in SPSS. However, although the Shapiro-Wilk test is generally considered to be better, there
are issues with using both and assessing normality visually, such as using Q-Q plots (not available
in JASP but can be produced in SPSS), is highly recommended (if you are interested in learning
more, consider reading this). As you selected all three DVs, the Shapiro-Wilk table reports the
test for each one and is divided by condition as we have independent groups. As we can see in
each row, none of the tests are significant so we can conclude the assumption of normality has not
been violated in this example.
Secondly, we will look at Levene’s test for the assumption of equal variances (homogeneity
of variance). You should have come across this test previously and uses a similar logic to the
Shapiro-Wilk. The null hypothesis is that the variances are equal between the groups, therefore
a sufficiently large difference in variance between the groups will be indicated by a significant
result. This test is also heavily criticised for reasons similar to the Shapiro-Wilk test above, so any

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 Figure 6: JASP window for normality and equal variances

conclusion you make should be in conjunction with a careful look at the data using plots (scroll up
to the boxplots, are the boxes and lines roughly symmetrical around the median line?). However,
the Levene’s test suggests that the assumption of equal variances has not been violated and we are
fine to continue.

3.4 Data analysis

This is the moment you have been waiting for. After all the visualising and checking, you want to
finally look at some inferential statistics. We can stay on the analysis page similar to Figure 6 as
most of the results are already here, but we were just ignoring them temporarily and require a few
more options. On the menu section, Student should be selected under Tests by default, but we
also want to select Welch. Under Additional Statistics, we also want to select Mean difference and
Effect size. If you really want to tidy things up, you could always untick both of the boxes under
Assumption Checks. Remember JASP automatically updates so you can select the information
when and if you need it. You should have a window that looks like Figure 7.
Looking at the Independent Samples T-Test table, we have all the information we want (and in
contrast to SPSS, all the information we need). We have both a Student and Welch T-Test (Welch’s
T-Test should be the default option but see appendix section 9.3 for more information). Remember
what the boxplots and descriptive statistics showed us, participants who were provided with audio
recordings gave higher ratings than those provided with transcripts. We can now support this
using the T-Test result for intellect, impression, and hiring recommendation. Firstly, we will go
through the intellect result, then you can do the others independently. In published articles and
your practical reports, T-Tests should be reported in the standard format of:
t (df ) = t statistic, p value, effect size.
For intellect, we would write the result for the Student T-Test up as t (37) = −3.53, p = .001,
Cohen’s d = −1.13. As we selected the mean difference, this is the unstandardised (or simple)
effect size between the two conditions, and simply tells us what the difference was between the
means for intellect in our two conditions. This shows that those in the transcript condition rated
the applicant 1.99 points on our scale lower on average than those in the audio recording condition.
This makes sense in our example, but if another study was performed using a different scale, the
mean difference between studies would not be able to be compared. This is where Cohen’s d
comes in. It is a standardised effect size that expresses the difference between two conditions in
terms of standard deviations. In our example, those in the transcript condition rated the applicant

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 Figure 7: JASP window for the T-Test results

1.13 standard deviations lower on average than those in the audio recording condition. As this is a
standardised unit, we would be able to compare this to other studies that used a different scale. To
interpret this result, we can look at the guidelines Cohen (1988) originally suggested. He suggested
results can be considered as small (±0.2), medium (±0.5), and large (±0.8) effects. However, it
is important that you compare the effects to those found in the published literature when you
perform your own research. These guidelines should be a last resort when you have no other point
of comparison. Following these rough guidelines for these examples, there appears to be a large
effect between the two conditions. Putting this all together, we could conclude something like this:
"An independent samples T-Test indicated that participants in the audio recording condition rated
the applicant significantly higher on a rating of intellect than participants in the audio recording
condition, t (37) = −3.53, p = .001, Cohen’s d = −1.13. This shows that there was a large effect
between the two conditions.". This is an example for the first DV, but there are two remaining.
Now it is your turn to think about the results and complete a few tasks.

3.4.1 Tasks
1. How would you write up the result for the impression rating?
2. What would you write up for the hiring recommendation rating?
3. Write this whole example up like you would for a results section in your coursework. Think
about the order we have done the analysis in. You want to include descriptive statistics, any
data screening, and finally inferential statistics. Include any plots or tables, and remember
effect sizes!

4 Example Two: T-Test

4.1 Study background
The next study we are going to look at is by Mehr, Song and Spelke (2016). They were interested in
whether singing to infants conveyed important information about social affiliation. Infants become
familiar with melodies that are repeated in their specific culture. The authors were interested in
whether a novel person (someone they had never seen before) could signal to the child that they

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are a member of the same social group and attract their attention by singing a familiar song to
them.
Mehr et al. (2016) invited 32 infants and their parents to participate in a repeated measures
experiment. Firstly, the parents were asked to repeatedly sing a previously unfamiliar song to the
infants for two weeks. When they returned to the lab, they measured the baseline gaze (where
they were looking) of the infants towards two unfamiliar people on a screen who were just silently
smiling at them. This was measured as the proportion of time looking at the individual who would
later sing the familiar song (0.5 would indicate half the time was spent looking at the familiar
singer. Values closer to one indicate looking at them for longer etc.). The two silent people on the
screen then took it in turns to sing a lullaby. One of the people sung the song that the infant’s
parents had been told to sing for the previous two weeks, and the other one sang a song with the
same lyrics and rhythm, but with a different melody. During this period, the amount of time spent
looking at each singer was measured (this was measured as the total gaze time (ms) as opposed to
a proportion). Mehl et al. (2016) then repeated the gaze procedure to the two people at the start
of the experiment to provide a second measure of gaze as a proportion of looking at the familiar
singer. We are therefore interested in whether the infants increased the proportion of time spent
looking at the singer who sang the familiar song after they sang, in comparison to before they sang
to the infants.

4.1.1 Task
1. What would your predictions be? Do you think the infants will look longer at the person
who sang the familiar song after they had sang the song, or do you think there will be little
difference between the two gaze proportions?

4.2 Data analysis

The first thing we need to do is load a new data file. Go back to the folder you downloaded at the
beginning of the section and open Mehr-study1-data.csv in JASP. Think about the process we went
through in the first example to explore the data, and then you need to think about how you are going
to analyse the data. The conditions of interest are called ’Baseline_Proportion_Gaze_to_Singer’
and ’Test_Proportion_Gaze_to_Singer’.

4.2.1 Tasks
1. Create a box plot for each condition and compare them.
2. Assess parametric assumptions. We do not need to worry about homogeneity of variance in
this example as it is a repeated measures design.

3. Analyse the data and write all this up in a short results section. Think about the design
of this study, you will need to click on T-Tests > Paired Samples T-Test this time. Do not
forget effect sizes!
4. If you fancy learning something new, you could have also performed One Sample T-Tests
on both of these conditions to investigate if they are significantly different from no gaze
preference (a gaze proportion of 0.5). Ask for help if you want to see how this is done.

5 Example Three: Correlation

5.1 Study background
Now that we have seen how you can run T-Tests, the next test to perform is a simple correlation
between two continuous variables. Correlations allow us to assess the degree of relationship between
two variables. The first example we are going to work with is from Beall, Hofer and Shaller (2016)
who investigated how the outbreak of infectious diseases can influence voting behaviour. They
were specifically interested in the emergence of the Ebola virus and whether it was associated with
support for a more conservative candidate over a liberal candidate in the US Federal elections.
There are two variables of interest that we are going to investigate: frequency of Google searches
for the Ebola virus, and political support for either a conservative or liberal candidate in the 2014

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US Federal elections. The first variable is called ’Daily.Ebola.Search.Volume’ and is the search
volume for particular topics in a geographical region. The topic with the highest search volume
in a particular day is scored 100, and all other topics are expressed as a percentage of that value.
Therefore, the closer the value is to 100, the more people Googled the Ebola virus on a specific
day. The second variable is called ’Voter.Intention.Index’. This was calculated by subtracting the
percentage of voters who intended to support a liberal candidate in the election from the percentage
of voters who intended to support a conservative candidate. Therefore, positive values indicate
greater support for conservative candidates and negative values indicate greater support for liberal
candidates.

5.1.1 Tasks
1. What will your prediction be? Do you think greater concern for infectious diseases will be
associated with greater support for conservative or liberal candidates?

5.2 Descriptive statistics

Start by loading Beall-Hofer-Shaller-data.csv into JASP. We are going to start again by looking
at the descriptive statistics. Enter both variables listed above into the empty white box seen in
Figure 4 and used in the previous examples.

5.2.1 Task
1. What is the mean and SD for both variables?
2. Create boxplots for both variables to have an initial look at the data.

5.3 Data screening

We can now start to think about whether a parametric version of correlation is appropriate for
our data. We want both both variables to be measured on a continuous scale, we want both
measurements to be in pairs, and we want there to be no outliers. We will think about each one
in turn.
Both of the variables are measured on a continuous scale. Remember to check that JASP has
correctly worked out what type of data each variable is by looking at the top of the columns in the
data view screen as seen in Figure 3. We want both variables to have a little ruler on top, which
they both should have.
Next, we want both variables to be in pairs. We start to have a small problem here. If you
looked closely when you opened the data, or when you were exploring the descriptive statistics,
you might have seen that we have 65 rows of data for the Ebola search index, but we only have
24 rows for the voter intention index. This makes sense as the data is split into days and the
voter intention index is based on polling data. We do not have polling data for every day, so the
correlations will only be based on the number of rows we have both a voter intention index and
an Ebola Google search volume. This leaves us with 24 complete pairs of data to analyse.
Finally, we want there to be no outliers. Outliers are extremely problematic for correlations as
it can bias the r value. We can look back at the boxplots you created during the tasks in section
5.2.1. Can you see any problematic outliers? It appears that the data looks fine, so we are all set
to go ahead and calculate some correlations.

5.4 Data analysis

We will be using a different analysis tab than the one we used for the T-Tests. Firstly, click on
Regression > Correlation Matrix to open a new analysis window. The next thing we want to do
is to drag both of the variables into the empty white box like we did for the descriptive statistics.
This will fill the table with two numbers, one for Pearson’s r (the correlation value) and one for
the p value. We also want to tick the box for a correlation matrix to visualise the correlation. This
will produce the screen you can see in Figure 8.
One of the first things you might notice in comparison to SPSS, is that you only get one set
of numbers in the correlation table. SPSS gives you the full matrix of every combination of your
variables (including correlating the same two variables). In JASP, it just provides you with what

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you need to know for two variables: what is the correlation coefficient, and what is the p value.
Simple. We could write the result up like this: "The correlation between daily Ebola search volume
and voter intention was small and non-significant, Pearson’s r(22) = .17, p = .430". We have
the (22) after r as that is the degrees of freedom for a correlation. JASP does not provide it you
directly, but it is the number of people in the analysis minus two (24 was the sample as we only
have 24 matching pairs of data, so 24-2).

5.4.1 Task
1. Write this example up like you would for a results section in your coursework. Remember to
do it in a logical order, and you can copy and paste the scatter plot if you want (although
do not do this for an assignment as the axis labels are not written formally).

Figure 8: JASP window for the correlation results

6 Example Four: Correlation

6.1 Study background
The final study we are going to look at is by Dawtry, Sutton and Sibley (2015). They were interested
in how people differ in their assessment of income inequality. Most people report wanting a fair
society where there is little inequality. However, previous research indicated that wealthy people
perceive society as already wealthy and are less likely to support wealth being redistributed as they
are happy with the current state of affairs. Dawtry et al. (2015) investigated if this was due to
wealthier people having a wealthier social circle. Therefore, from their point of view they estimate
the general population to be wealthier than it is due to everyone around them also being wealthy.
They recruited 305 participants in an online survey to complete a series a questions about: their
own wealth, the wealth of their social circle, inequality in their social circle, the average wealth of
the population, and inequality in the population.

6.2 Data analysis

The first thing we need to do is open the data file for this example. Open Dawtry-Sutton-Sibley-
data.csv in JASP. You can do this example on your own following example three (Section 5). You

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will be looking at the correlations between each of the variables in the data file so it will be a bit
more crowded than the first correlation example.

6.2.1 Tasks
1. What is the mean and standard deviation for each of the variables?
2. Screen the data. Are there any outliers, and do we have matching pairs for each variable?
3. Look at the correlations between each of the variables. Are there any significant positive or
negative correlations?
4. Write this up like you would for a coursework assignment. You can look back to example
three if you need to.

7 Summary
This means it is now the end of the workshop! Hopefully you have found it interesting, and you can
now see there are alternatives to SPSS. JASP is a lightweight alternative that helpfully provides
you with information that you just do not get in SPSS. Although it is not perfect (it is still in
development and not even at version 1.0 yet!), there are many advantages that it can offer you as
a psychology student. For example, it provides you with a simple output with just the values you
need, with the option to add more information as and when required. Think back to when you
first came across an SPSS output. You are bombarded with information before you even know
what to do with it. On the other hand, JASP is more intuitive, and is hopefully a little easier to
understand if you are still getting to grips with statistics in psychology. Furthermore, one of the
most important contributions of JASP is the ease in which you can produce effect sizes. Jacob
Cohen (1990: 12), a famous statistician in psychology, said "the primary product of a research
inquiry is one or more measures of effect size, not p values". Despite its popularity, SPSS provides
only a handful of effect sizes and you are required to calculate most of them separately. JASP
allows you to simply tick a box to produce them which saves you time, and reduces the likelihood
of making a mistake if you were to calculate it by hand.
However, despite the drawbacks, SPSS is still useful at times and there are things that JASP
simply cannot do at this moment in time. Therefore, it is unlikely that you will solely use JASP
to analyse your data. There is nothing wrong with switching between different statistics packages
to play to each of their strengths. Hopefully you will see that JASP can offer several benefits, and
statistics might appear to be less frightening.
If you have any further questions about any of the topics covered (or not covered) in this session,
feel free to email me on bartle16@uni.coventry.ac.uk.

8 Additional Resources
• A free online textbook by Craig Wendorf can be downloaded from the Open Science Frame-
work. This has chapters on SPSS and JASP, and provides some additional content that was
not covered in this session.
• JASP have their own YouTube channel with a few tutorials on how to perform simple
Bayesian analyses (read appendix 9.1 if you still have no idea what this is). However, if
you search JASP on Youtube, there are a few tutorials on importing data and statistical
designs you may be more familiar with made by users that you might want to look at if you
want some guidance in your own time.

9 Appendix
9.1 Bayesian statistics
There is not really enough room to provide a thorough overview, but to cut a long story short, it is
an entirely different field of statistical inference. Whereas classical (or frequentist) statistics is based
on controlling long-term error rates through p values, Bayesian statistics allows the probabilities

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of different hypotheses to be calculated based on the data available. One of the limitations in
using p values is that all the information it provides is the observed data were unlikely assuming
the null hypothesis was true, nothing more, nothing less. The aim is to control your long-term
error rates, but it provides no information on the probability of different hypotheses. However, a
lot of published research and textbooks make out that it does, so it would be useful to be aware
of the concepts of Bayesian Statistics. There are a few good introductory sources to the basics
such as the blog post by Dablander (2015), and an annotated reading list by Etz et al. 2016 can
be downloaded from the Open Science Framework. More and more published research is using
Bayesian statistics, but it is currently not taught on many courses so it would be worthwhile to
read up on it yourself.

9.2 Converting an SPSS data file to .csv

Conveniently, SPSS already has the capability for converting a .sav data file to .csv. If you are on
SPSS, click File > Export > CSV Data. In the window that appears, make sure you have both
’write variable names to file’ and ’save value labels where defined instead of data values’. This
ensures you have column names (the names of your variables) and that if the factor has both a
label and value in SPSS (as explained in section 1.3.3), it is the label that is retained in the .csv
file. You can choose where you want to save it and you can change the file name if you want.

9.3 Student or Welch T-Test?

When you perform an independent samples T-Test, one of the parametric assumptions you test
for is homogeneity of variance. The issues surrounding using the Levene’s test have already been
mentioned in section 3.3.2. but a further issue is that it will be extremely unlikely to have exactly
equal variances in two groups. Unequal variances can be problematic and lead to an increase in type
one error rates (Lakens 2015). An alternative approach is to use Welch’s T-Test by default which
corrects for uneven variances and sample sizes. This essentially uses a correction to decrease the
degrees of freedom and consequently the power of the test. Therefore, as the difference in variances
increases, the degrees of freedom decreases to make the test increasingly more conservative. This
attempts to ensure the false-positive error rate does not increase above 5%. For example, in section
3.4 you might have noticed if you selected Welch’s T-Test, the degrees of freedom change from 37
to 33.43. It is generally recommended to use the Welch’s version by default as you do not need to
conduct Levene’s test first (saves you time), and essentially provides the same result when there
are equal variances and sample sizes in each group. For a more thorough explanation, read Lakens’
(2015) blog post or if you are interested, a more technical paper by Derrick et al. 2016.

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