How to use SPSS: Presentation by Sara Jimenez Soffa, Ph.D. Institutional Researcher

Dear Students,

I prepared the following step-by-step illustrated procedure for documenting basic descriptive statistics, frequencies, and creating charts/tables for your data using SPSS.

  1. Entering Data into a new SPSS data spreadsheet
  2. Open SPSS 16.0 for Windows
  1. In the Variable View (bottom left hand side of page) – begin to type in your variables – in this view, you can also define and label your variables as numeric or string variables, give them properties, etc. It is here you will type in the questions that are on your survey. Let’s try an example.
  1. Opening Data from Excel: In many cases, students feel most comfortable working with/entering data in Excel. SPSS is very intuitive and works nicely with Excel. You can open an excel data file in SPSS rather easily – the important thing to remember is to have your data labels across the top of the excel worksheet, going from left to right. Let me give you an example.
  1. Open Microsoft Excel
  2. Type in the following to your blank spreadsheet

Save the file and open SPSS

  1. Choose ‘open and existing data source’ and click OK
  2. Find your file and select Excel in the Files of Type box and click OK:

You should keep the box checked that says “Read variable names from the first row of data” and click continue. Here’s what you’ll see in the Variable View:

In the Data View, you’ll see this and you can add data right from this screen. Try it:

  1. Opening Existing Data in SPSS: Open Edgewood Data Set on My Edgewood
  2. Select Variable view option

Data View:

Variable View:

How to Enter Data

Descriptive Statistics:

Normal Distribution – Mean, Median, Mode, Standard Deviation

  1. Choose a variable from the Edgewood database and calculate the basic statistics. Let’s choose PT/FT status. In addition, view the graph of the distribution of the variable.
  2. Choose Analyze – Descriptive Statistics – Frequencies
  1. Choose a variable (PT/FT Status) and add variable to right column and choose the Statistics button.

From your output, you can see how many full-time and how many part-time students attended Edgewood College Fall 07.

Frequencies

[DataSet1] C:\Documents and Settings\SJimenezSoffa\My Documents\database for SPSS tutorial.sav

Statistics
PT/FT status
N / Valid / 2582
Missing / 0
PT/FT status
Frequency / Percent / Valid Percent / Cumulative Percent
Valid / Full-time / 1591 / 61.6 / 61.6 / 61.6
Part-time / 991 / 38.4 / 38.4 / 100.0
Total / 2582 / 100.0 / 100.0
  1. Let’s try another one. This time, let’s use Race_re. And – we’re going to choose all statistics we would like to view and click continue:

Frequencies

Statistics
Race/Ethnicity Recode
N / Valid / 2582.00
Missing / .00
Mean / 5.81
Median / 6.00
Mode / 6.00
Std. Deviation / 1.03
Sum / 14995.00
Race/Ethnicity Recode
Frequency / Percent / Valid Percent / Cumulative Percent
Valid / Nonresident Aliens / 46 / 1.8 / 1.8 / 1.8
African-American / 67 / 2.6 / 2.6 / 4.4
American Indian/Alaskan Native / 15 / .6 / .6 / 5.0
Asian / 47 / 1.8 / 1.8 / 6.8
Hispanic / 70 / 2.7 / 2.7 / 9.5
White / 2127 / 82.4 / 82.4 / 91.9
Unknown/Other / 210 / 8.1 / 8.1 / 100.0
Total / 2582 / 100.0 / 100.0
  1. Ok – let’s do a cross-tab – Let’s figure out how many FT/PT students come from the different ethnic groups. Here’s how we run a cross-tabs: Analyze/Descriptive Statistics/Crosstabs:

Put PT/FT in your ROW and Race_Re in your COLUMN:

  1. Click ‘ok’. What do you see
  1. Play with this – you can choose any variable – multiple variables – have fun!
  1. Creating Custom Tables:

Let’s get a picture of something fun – let’s look at gender, pt/ft status, and class. Here’s how we do it: Choose Analyze/Tables/Custom Tables:

First – drag gender and class over to the table-designer:

Click OK – and see what you get:

Table 1
Gender
Female / Male
Count / Count
Class / FR / 270 / 141
G / 233 / 140
JR / 287 / 121
L / 3 / 4
N / 89 / 41
PD / 75 / 14
Q / 15 / 17
SO / 280 / 126
SR / 478 / 157
W / 52 / 9
Y / 20 / 10

You can play with this – add layers – let’s add PT/FT to this table layer and see what we get:

Table 1
Gender
Female / Male
PT/FT status / PT/FT status
Full-time / Part-time / Full-time / Part-time
Count / Count / Count / Count
Class / FR / 257 / 13 / 135 / 6
G / 34 / 199 / 5 / 135
JR / 223 / 64 / 99 / 22
L / 1 / 2 / 0 / 4
N / 27 / 62 / 11 / 30
PD / 0 / 75 / 0 / 14
Q / 2 / 13 / 1 / 16
SO / 250 / 30 / 113 / 13
SR / 316 / 162 / 101 / 56
W / 9 / 43 / 2 / 7
Y / 3 / 17 / 2 / 8

You can do more fun things – select the classes that you want, for example. Let’s say you only want to see this table with Freshmen – here’s how you do it. Choose Data/Select Cases:

This will add a filter to your data – only selecting the Freshmen – then you can repeat the earlier steps to create a table:

Table 1
Gender
Female / Male
PT/FT status / PT/FT status
Full-time / Part-time / Full-time / Part-time
Count / Count / Count / Count
Class / FR / 257 / 13 / 135 / 6

You can also make charts with SPSS. Let’s figure out how the freshmen break down by gender. We can create a pie chart:

Now it’s time to practice – play – choose some variables and find out what you want to find. Here are some sample questions:

What is the mean age of the SENIORS in the dataset?

Hint – make sure you select seniors and then run the descriptive to find mean age.

Use DESCRIPTTIVES instead of frequencies:

Choose the numeric field of AGE and select OPTIONS to choose MEAN:

Click OK for your answer:

Descriptive Statistics
N / Mean
Age / 635 / 26.05
Valid N (listwise) / 635