SPSS

Part 1:
Data Entry and some VERY simple descriptive stats
 SOME WORDS OF WARNING…
 A reminder that you will be using SPSS next semester in Psyc 310, in your
own research, if you serve as research assistants, and possibly in other
classes in the sciences (Bio).
 We will NOT be re-teaching you the use of the program each time – you
are expected to pay attention the first time.
 There will be 3-4 homework assignments associated with SPSS this
semester
… The first two will count as independent homeworks (data entry and
analysis) and there will be an in-lab “test” on a common dataset during
our last scheduled lab period which will contribute 5% to your total
class grade. Some future ‘generic’ homeworks will also include SPSS
tasks, but the ones identified on the coursepage in red are the only
‘pure-SPSS’ assignments.
 GETTING STARTED
 Open SPSS

 Likely be choosing:
… “type in data” (New Dataset)
… “Open an existing data source”

 Since we are creating a dataset, select

the “type in data” button and hit
“OK” at the bottom.

 Once that window disappears you

will see that you are in either the
“data view” or “variable view” page
 DATA VIEW PAGE
 This is where you will see the
data in its’ raw form, and the
page from which you will be
running your analyses.

 The page that you are on will be

highlighted in yellow down in
the bottom left of your screen.

 We need to start by defining our

variables for the program … and
for that we need to be in
“variable view”.
… Click on the tab for variable
view to switch over
 VARIABLE VIEW PAGE
 As you can see – we are going to define our characteristics by what Kind of
data we have (NOIR) and put in labels so that we can understand the printouts.

Each of these values

represents one data
column on the data
view page.

It is easiest if you
know all the data you
will have to enter
beforehand so when
you set this up, it is
organized
  Quiz Average for student
(0-100)
OUR DATA
 Exam Average for student
(0-100)

 We will pull a chunk of our

 A data grouping answering
data from my classpage ….
this question: “What was
And some of it you will be
the higher percentage –
making up.
quiz or exam?” (Quiz or
Exam)

 First though  What kind

of data do we have?
 Your ranking of which
name you like best (rank
from 1-10)

 GPA (0-4.00)
  Quiz Average for student (0-
WHAT KIND OF 100)
… Ratio
DATA?  Exam Average for student
(0-100)
… Ratio
 What kind of questions
would we be able to ask/  A data grouping answering
answer with the data that we this question: “What was the
have? higher percentage – quiz or
exam?” (Quiz or Exam)
… Nominal
 We can organize the data any
way that we’d like to (e.g. by  Your ranking of which name
the most important to least you like best (rank from 1-
important) as long as it 10)
makes sense. … Ordinal

 GPA (0-4.00)
 We will organize by type of … Ratio
data (NOIR)
 NOMINAL DATA
Start by entering a name that ‘captures’ what our nominal variable stands for
“Highscore” --- Note only use one word

Remember that in our experiments – these will likely be the IV’s

Notice that when you hit enter – a number of other columns get filled in. These may
not be correct for what we need (the computer cannot read your mind) – if you don’t
enter the data in correctly, mistakes WILL be made in the analyses. So next, click
on the “MEASURE” icon
 Choose nominal

Next, go to the “Values” column and click on it and a new screen pops up

Add in a Code for Value (must be Finish adding all values/

numeric). And a label you will labels then click OK
understand Click on “ADD”
 ORDINAL DATA

As with the Nominal data:

First Enter in a Name for the variable in column 1: RANKING

Then go to the “Measure column” and select ORDINAL

DONE!
There isn’t any other step as there are no groups to label
 INTERVAL/RATIO DATA

Our last 3 pieces of data are all Interval/Ratio (remember that mathematically, these are
going to be treated the same and do not need special separations for SPSS.

Set up the last 3 – QUIZ, EXAM, and GPA.

This time, however, we do not have to make ANY adjustments in the “Measure”
column. So just hit enter, then move to the next.

Now we’re ready to enter the data, go down to the bottom left
and click on the “data view” button
The 5 lines of data we entered are now our column headings in the data view page.
Now we enter our data….

ONE THING THOUGH – we will enter in the value labels

(1,2) in column 1 rather than the words Quiz, Exam

All data except for the “Ranking” and GPA comes from the webpage I sent.

Enter the data.

 OOPS!

This actually is an accident… but this

would fall under the category of “Hmm,
I should have thought about that when I
was designing the project. I now need a
rule to deal with this.

However, SPSS (if left alone) will run

the analysis excluding this piece of data
whenever Col 1 info is used

Now enter in your scores for the ranking and GPA – they need to fall into the appropriate
parameters (a GPA cannot be 7.23). But make up the data.
Here’s the data I have (yours will look a
little different in col 2 and 5).

Let’s say we want to clean up the data a

little bit
In the ranking column, it doesn’t
make sense to have decimal points (nor in
the first column)

** We’ll head back to the Variable view

by clicking on the tab at the bottom, and
changing some of those boxes we didn’t
use the first time.
Decimals = Change the values here to change what shows up on the data page
Change Highscore and Ranking to “0” decimals

Columns = the number of characters in the column headings

Align = just like in word to make things more readable to you

 Now – why don’t we save what we have.

Use either the icon or pull-down menu “file” and save

This is just an annoyance that shows up after each action – close or ignore if it isn’t an
analysis.
 NOW LET’S MAKE SOME CHANGES
Imagine that, to our surprise, we forgot an entire column of data (or in this case we had data that
only became available later).

How do we change what we have?

Let’s say our new piece of data is an overall class ranking (their ranking in the entire class or 20XX)
not their ranking in this class – and that data is helpful to us.

(1) Because it is ranked data – we want to keep it next to the other ordinal data so we
have to insert a column.

(2) Because we used the label ‘ ranking ’ when we entered the data – it is more likely to
confuse the two columns we have so we want to change the column names. Remember that these
two are both rankings – but are ranking VERY different things.

(3) Because the rankings are from the entire class (of let’s say 200 people) the rankings
seem incomplete and we need to re-rank the scores.

(4) One student dropped the class (or we were forced to drop her because of the tied
percentage) – so we need to replace her scores with another student
 INSERTING A COLUMN
First off – switch back to “variable view.” Go to the pull-down menu under “EDIT” and select
the “insert variable” option.
 As usually happens when you use an “insert function,” the column may have been placed in the wrong
place (you want it after the original “ranking”)

To delete a row – click on the very first column on that line (the numbers) and the row will be selected.
When it is highlighted – hit the delete key.

Place the cursor on quiz and insert variable again – so SPSS automatically inserts ABOVE
The name is highlighted so we need to give it a name and change the scale to Ordinal

1) Change the name to “20XX_rank”

2) Change the final column to “Ordinal”
3) Rename variable 2 from ‘Ranking’ to “NameRank”
4) Remove the decimals option for the new column
Here is the new data. Notice that the other columns moved in response to our changes
on the other page. We now need to remove the one piece of faulty data – the one with
the tied exam/quiz score.

Select the row of data by clicking on the number all the way to the left and hit delete.

Now enter in the data for Uzume (we will assume that she has the same “name ranking”
as did Freya
Here are the overall class rankings

With a small dataset like this, we can

easily do the rankings yourself.

With a large dataset (and numerable,

potential tied rankings etc.), it might be
better to let the computer do this for us.

Select the column by clicking

on the column heading (turns blue), go up
under the “TRANSFORM” pull-down
menu – select “rank cases” and you’ll get
what shows up on the next page…
(1) Select column to be ranked

(2) Shift it over to the

“variable(s)” box by clicking on
the arrow

(3) Double check the order in

which the ranking is to be done –
Assign rank 1 to lowest value.

(4) Finally, click on “Ok” button

New column has been
created for us
 I cleaned mine up by deleting the
original data column (remember
that this an act of finality – once
lost the data is gone).

I then moved the newly ranked

column over (and took out the
decimals).

NOW …. Let’s do some statistics!

 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS
 We are going to
collect:
… all the various
descriptive
statistics we’ve
learned about so
far

… a set of frequency
distributions for
our variables
(1) Select all 3 of our Interval/Ratio variable and shift them into Variable(s) column

(2) Select the

Statistics button to
bring up all of the
available options.
By doing this… we
do not have to run
the “descriptives”
analysis.

(3) Select the options shown and then hit

“continue” and you’ll be taken to an output
window with the statistics done
Statistics
Quiz Exam GPA
N Valid 10 10 10
Missing 0 0 0
Mean 75.1300 74.6700 2.8000
Median 74.1500 74.5000 2.8400
Mode 58.80a 75.90 1.73a
Std. Deviation 9.72603 9.00704 .67082
Skewness -.046 .078 -.134
Std. Error of Skew .687 .687 .687
Kurtosis -.482 -.592 -.928
Std. Error of Kurtosis 1.334 1.334 1.334
Range 30.40 29.10 2.08
Sum 751.30 746.70 28.00

a. Multiple modes exist. The smallest value is shown

You CAN of course – print things up …. BUT PLEASE REMEMBER … you

could also just keep the info on your computer and save a few trees.

Print only what you need to turn in.

Quiz
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent
Valid 58.8 1 10.0 10.0 10.0
64.2 1 10.0 10.0 20.0
70.8 1 10.0 10.0 30.0
71.7 1 10.0 10.0 40.0
73.3 1 10.0 10.0 50.0
75 1 10.0 10.0 60.0
77.5 1 10.0 10.0 70.0
82.5 1 10.0 10.0 80.0
88.3 1 10.0 10.0 90.0
89.2 1 10.0 10.0 100.0

Total 10 100.0 100.0

Good news! You’re now ready to do the first of the computer homeworks.

Check the webpage for due date and requirement.