POK STATS BLOG

Students are not digital natives. They may often be online, but this does not mean that they are particularly savvy about how to learn or work with new software-- particularly more complex software such as SPSS. One of the quirk things I've noticed that is that in some cases, when students are working in SPSS, the output window or the syntax window automatically "hides." This behavior is fine when we what to do a bunch of things before viewing the output; it's more problematic for students who are learning the program for the first time. It can get confusing to see what's happened to one or another SPSS window. To change the behavior, for example when I run an analysis, have the SPSS output window pop up, do the following: Select Edit->Options   in the General Tab , look in the lower-right-hand, " Notification " area; you should see a checkbox for "Raise Viewer Window". Make sure that it's selected. See here and here for addition...

Topic #1 introduces students to the basics of statistics including types of statistical studies, levels and units of measurement in statistics, and how to assess studies that make use of statistical techniques. The main focus here is to get students accustomed to thinking about basics of variables. Objectives Explain the purpose of the measures of central tendency Identify the three measures of central tendency Calculate the mode, median, and mean Differentiate and explain percentiles vs. percentages Calculate percentiles Explain the mathematical characteristics of the mean Correctly select the appropriate measure of central tendency for a given distribution of data Identify importance of outliers and relationship to skewness Key Terms central tendency mode median percentiles mean outliers weighted mean symmetry positive skew negative skew Before Class read Healey-Ch1 View PPT This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation...

UPDATE: and the old adage holds true, if, it's too good to be true, it isn't true. Many of the videos actually require a $49 fee. So I'll revisit making videos for this class. I thought about doing this very thing, but why reinvent the wheel?  This person's videos are excellent and it's free to sign up- you will  have to sign up in order to view all the videos:  http://www.spssvideotutor.com/

This is one of the most helpful sites for SPSS questions: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_SPSS_and_PASW  The text below is the introduction to this wikibook. Using SPSS and PASW SPSS or "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences"  is a software program widely used in the social sciences for conducting statistical analysis of data. The company that produced the software was  SPSS, Inc. , but it was bought in 2008 by IBM. During the transition, the software package was renamed to PASW, but has since been renamed back to SPSS.  GNU PSPP  is a  free  alternative to SPSS [1] . It appears to be very similar. This book is a rudimentary introduction to the use of SPSS for basic statistical analysis. The book is written with a focus on social scientific analysis in mind (particularly  Sociology ). Part I of the book covers basic operations within SPSS, from installing it to manipulating data. Part II illustrates how to do a variety of b...

So I've been giving some thought to how to go about revamping this class. I think the first day, I would ask all students to fill out 5 surveys. Then they would enter all that raw data into SPSS to give them a good idea of data entry-- how SPSS records data in numerical form. Although students say they understand this when we work with existing data sets, I'm beginning, more and more, to see the value of this step.

[updated 7/31/2012] This is a GNU alternative to SPSS. I have not played with it some can't say much about it, but it's suppose to be very similar to SPSS  so you may want to try it out. At some point, I'll try to test it and  see how it compares . I have tried out the software and it's easy to install and resembles SPSS very much. There may be some bells and whistles missing, but it should be more than enough for the requirements of this class. The software's main page is here:  http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/  This site contains guides, etc. and is pretty informative. If you just want to download and install the software, visit this page for the Windows version:  http://pspp.awardspace.com/ . Choose the appropriate package for your operating system (32bit or 64bit) and download the latest version. This package includes an installer package so it should be just like installing any other kind of software. I don't use Mac so I can not spea...

SPSS is a very expensive software and this makes student access to it a recurring problem. However, there are now some options. First off, there are several SPSS packages with many add-on modules . The idea is that starting from a 'base,' consumers can expand the software to fit their needs. SPSS also offers Academic editions  such as a 'Grad Pack' or a 'Faculty Pack' that vary in price. These packs also come in Base, Standard, or Premium versions. For most undergraduate introductory statistics courses the Base pack is all you'll need. Both the Grad Pack and Faculty Pack (all editions) are significantly discounted from the commercial edition and may be rented from various places including E-Academy's OntheHub eStore  (6-month for $40 or 12-mths for $70) StudentDiscounts.com  (12-month for $64) Studica.com  (12-month for $70) IBM also offers a 14-day trial edition Keep in mind that the edition you are looking for is named  IBM® ...