Lecture 5 - Using SPSS

Question 0

In SPSS, each row represents…

Answer 0

One subject

Question 1

What does SPSS stand for?

Answer 1

Statistics Package for the Social Sciences

Question 2

In SPSS, each column represents…

Answer 2

One variable or one level of a within-subject variable

Question 3

Variable ‘name’ in SPSS must be…

Answer 3

Unique, and is usually short - label can be longer and more informative!

Question 4

To summarise data, the correct SPSS menu is…

Answer 4

Analyse/Descriptive Statistics/Descriptives.

You can then specify options, e.g. mean or s.d.

Question 5

You can get detailed data summaries in SPSS from…

Answer 5

Analyse/Frequencies

E.g. for gender

Question 6

What are the possible solutions for outliers?

Answer 6

• check the original data and find the outlier - if you have reason to believe it was an error, exclude it
• conduct tests only on the middle range of data, e.g. i.q. range
• transform data ti get rid of skew

Question 7

What does a histogram show?

Answer 7

The distribution of values

Question 8

How do you create a histogram in SPSS?

Answer 8

Graphs/legacy dialogs/histogram

Question 9

How do you plot mean graphs with error bars in SPSS?

Answer 9

Graphs/error bar plot

In the following window, it can either be simple or clustered (useful for multiple IVs)
The data in the chart can be either ‘summaries for groups of cases’ (one column for multiple groups) or ‘summaries of separate variables’ (multiple columns)

Question 10

Before running any inferential statistics, what should you understand about the data?

Answer 10

• whether it’s normally distributed
• whether there are any major outliers or errors
• whether there are big differences between conditions
• what result we expect the test(s) to reveal