Introduction: What Is SAS?

SAS is a modular, integrated, and hardware-independent system of statistical software. It is a particularly powerful tool for social scientists because it allows them to easily perform a myriad of statistical analyses that might be required in the course of conducting research. SAS is comprehensive enough to perform the most sophisticated multivariate analyses (i.e., multiple dependent variables), but is also easy to use so that undergraduates can also perform basic analyses after only a short period of instruction.

In a sense, SAS can be viewed as a library of prewritten statistical algorithms. By submitting a short SAS program, you can access a prewritten procedure and use it to analyze a set of data. For example, below are the SAS statements used to call up the algorithm that calculates Pearson correlation coefficients:

PROC CORR   DATA=D1;
   RUN;

The preceding statements cause SAS to compute correlation coefficients for all numeric variables in your dataset. The ability to call up complex procedures with such a simple statement makes this system powerful and easy to use. By contrast, if you had to prepare your own programs to compute correlations by using a programming language such as FORTRAN or BASIC, it would require many statements, and there would be several opportunities for error. By using SAS instead, most of the work is completed and allows you to focus on the results of the analysis rather than on the mechanics for obtaining those results.