Initially, SPSS stood for Statistical Package for Social Sciences, and it was developed in the 1960’s by the by Chairman of the Board, Norman H. Nie in collaboration with C. Hadlai Hull and Dale Bent. When it was invented, SPSS was used in psychology research to analyze social research data. Today, however, SPSS is usually used in psychology, business, and medical or university research.
SPSS is preferred by the researcher as it is user-friendly because of its “point-and-click” interface. Most of the other statistical packages are based on programming languages. Some statistical packages that are “point-and-click” menu based do not have all the features that a researcher requires. SPSS, however, is the complete package because it is based on the “point-and-click” interface and is full of features. That is why most researchers, either in psychology, medicine or business, prefer to analyze data on SPSS.
In SPSS, the researcher can enter any type of data easily using the “import” function from the file menu. SPSS has two windows called the “data window” and the “viewer window.” In the SPSS data window, we can manually enter the data and change the data. In research, either psychology research, medical research or business research, data must be manipulated. In the SPSS data window, we cannot assign variable names that are more than eight characters, but from the viewer window, we can assign a label as long as we want. Additionally, from the viewer window of SPSS, we can fix missing values or other operations. In psychology, most of the researchers use SPSS to calculate the descriptive statistics, to help with significance testing and basic inferential tests, to find the analyses of the variance, to help with more advanced correlation and regression techniques, and to manage data.
A psychology researcher can easily calculate descriptive statistics in SPSS. They do this from the “analysis” menu where selecting “descriptive statistics” is required. In psychology research, many researchers want to compare two independent samples or two related samples. By using SPSS, a psychology researcher can easily compare two groups. Sometimes, when a sample does not meet the assumption of normal distribution, then a researcher can use a “non-parametric test” option available from the SPSS analysis menu. In psychology research, many times groups of the independent variables are more than two and the researcher needs to use advanced techniques like ANOVA, MANOVA, ANCOVA and MANCOVA. SPSS performs this analysis very easily and accurately. In psychology, the researcher needs to be advanced in regression techniques like multiple regression, logistic regression and SEM analysis. All regression techniques are available in the “SPSS regression” option, but for SEM analysis SPSS has an add-on module that performs this analysis very easily.
In medical or business research, most of the techniques used by the researchers are the same, but they use these techniques for different purposes. For example, in medicine, T-test, Chi-square, Analysis of variance, etc. techniques are used to test whether a particular drug can cure the illness. Regression technique is used to predict the long term impact of a drug.
In SPSS, all procedures are the same for all techniques but the uses are different. In business, T-test in SPSS is used to compare the mean of two samples. Samples may be output of workers, sales of two regions, etc. In business, the regression technique is used to predict average behavior of the dependent variable based on independent variables. For example, it can be used if business researchers want to predict sales for next year. If a credit card company wants to predict the risk of a credit card, he can use these tests to predict the risks. In SPSS, “logistic regression,” “discriminate analysis” and “CHAID” options are used to predict the risk. In SPSS, there are other options that make analysis very easy. For example, in SPSS, the “transform” option gives the flexibility to compute new variables or to change the existing variable. The SPSS “compute” option performs all the mathematical operations to make the changes in the data. In SPSS, the “graph” provides a high quality chart. With help, everyone can use SPSS. Samples and case studies are given in SPSS help. Step-by-step, these case studies are solved in SPSS and the results are interpreted.
