Introduction to SPSS

SPSS is a data management and analysis software package, maintained by IBM. On the surface it looks a lot like a spreadsheet and performs many of the same functions. Unlike most spreadsheets, however, SPSS provides easy access to a large bevvy of statistical tests and graphics and supports much larger datasets. It is probably the most popular and well-known commercial statistical software within the Education, Sociology and Psychology department.

To follow along with the examples in this guide, download the CSV file below. The data was collected from three publicly available reports provided by the U.S. Census Bureau:

U. S. Census Bureau. (2010). B01003 - Total Population. All Counties within Illinois. 2006-2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_5YR_B01003&prodType=table

U. S. Census Bureau. (2010). B23006 - Educational Attainment By Employment Status For The Population 25 To 64 Years Universe: Population 25 to 64 years . All Counties in Illinois. 2006-2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_5YR_B23006&prodType=table

U. S. Census Bureau. (2010). S1903 - Median Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2010 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars): All Counties within Illinois. 2006-2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_10_5YR_S1903&prodType=table

Below there is a CSV file containing this data, as well as a preformatted SPSS file (with extension ".sav"). The SAV file can be opened directly in the SPSS Data Editor, however new users are encouraged to download the CSV, since uploading data from CSVs or other text-based files is a fairly common task (see the "Importing Data" tab).

We want to thank the Instructional Services Librarian and Scholarly Commons Co-Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Merinda Kaye Hensley, who granted permission to use their lib-guide templates.

In addition, University of Utah Professor Oakley E. Gordon, Ph.D. from the Psychology department, for allowing us to modify and display handouts from his Psy 5250/6250 class (Applied Statistics).

 http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/ssdata

http://www.princeton.edu/~otorres/Excel/

Finally, we'd like to thank Toni Yungai for developing this subject guide.