Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

LESSON 1 Week 2

Topics: Introduction to SPSSS

Basic Structure of SPSS Data File
SPSS Data editor Menu

At the end of the lesson, the students would be able to:

 Describe data types and demonstrate the procedure to start SPSS on the system. 
Distinguish the different notations in using SPSS commands

SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences)

• is a powerful, user-friendly software package for the manipulation and statistical analysis of
data
• is a package of programs for manipulating, analyzing, and presenting data
• The package is particularly useful for students and researchers in psychology, sociology,
psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences, containing as it does an extensive range of both
univariate and multivariate procedures much used in these disciplines

Opening SPSS for the first time

• Double-click SPSS icon and a small window will open giving you several choices: Run a
tutorial, Type in data or opening an existing SPSS file.
• To create new file, click new data set then click “OK”

Enter data in SPSS directly

 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Basic Structure of SPSS Data File

 The Data editor consists of two windows: the Data View, which allows the data to be entered
and the Variable View, which allows the types of variables to be specified.

Data View

• In Data View, columns represent variables and rows represent cases.

• Example: variables like gender and length in columns; cases like gender and length in rows
 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Variable View
 This is where you define the variables you will be using: to define/modify a property of a given
variable, you click on the cell containing the property you want to define/modify

- You can modify the name and the type of your variable,
- the width, which corresponds to the number of characters you can have in a cell,
- the decimals, which corresponds to the number of decimals recorded,
- the label is used when you want to define a variable more accurately or to describe it. In
the example above, the label “length” could be “length of the body”.
- the values: useful for categorical data (e.g. gender: male=1 and female=2).
- missing: useful for epidemiological questionnaires,
- column (see width),
- align: like Excel: right, left or centre,
- measure: scale (e.g. weight: quantitative variable), ordinal (e.g. no, a little, a lot) or nominal
(e.g. male or female: qualitative variable).
 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Enter Variable

Enter Cases
 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Import Data from Excel

• If you are opening an Excel file, a window will appear and you will have to specify which
worksheet your data are on.
• Select File ---------> Open -------> Data
• Choose Excel as file type
• Select the file you want to import
• Then click open
 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Open Excel files in SPSS

 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Continue

Clean Data after import Data files

• Run cases summaries for all variables
• Run frequency for qualitative variables and Descriptive for quantitative variables
• Check outputs to see if you have variables with wrong values
• Check missing values and physical surveys if you use paper surveys, and make sure they are
really missing
• Sometimes, you need to record string variables into numeric variables
Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION
 Immaculat e Conception - I College of Arts and T echnology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

SPSS Data Editor Menu

• The data editor window is the default window when you run SPSS.
• We mentioned already that data editor has two views: Data View and Variable View 
Many tasks in SPSS are performed by selecting appropriate "Pull-down" menus.

The Menus in data editor window include:

1. File – To open an existing file, to read data (from a text data file or from an application [like
Excel] data file) into Data Editor Window, to save a data file, and to exit SPSS for Windows.
2. Edit - To make changes like copy, cut or paste to the Data Editor window. These functions
work just like a spreadsheet.
3. Data - To define variables, insert variables or cases, sort cases, merge files, split files, select
cases and use a variable to weight cases.
4. Transform - SPSS can easily create new variables through variable transformation or recoding
the data values of an existing variable.
5. Analyze - SPSS provides an extensive list of statistical techniques for data analysis.
6. Graphs - To obtain high resolution plots and graphs, which can be edited in Chart Editor
window. SPSS provides various commonly used high resolution statistical graphs.
7. Utilities - To run script and to display information on the contents of SPSS data files.
8. Add-Ons - SPSS provides many other analytical techniques that are sold separately. If your
institution/company purchases some of these additional add-on modules, you can run these
techniques through the Add-Ons Menu.
9. Window - To move to an open window or to see which window is active. The window with a
check mark is the active one.
10. Help - To get help on topics in SPSS and to ask the statistics coach some questions.
 Immaculate Conception - I College of Arts and Technology
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS WITH SOFTWARE APPLICATION

References:
http://calcnet.mth.cmich.edu/org/spss/data_editor_window.htm
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/sscc/pubs/spss/classintro/spss_students1.html#data -editor-.sav-files