Good news! You don’t have to know diddlysquat about the math behind statistics to be able to come up with well-calculated conclusions and display them in fancy graphs. We won’t be doing any calculations by hand. All you need is the IBM SPSS Statistics software and a bunch of numbers. This book shows you how to type the numbers, click options in the menus, and produce brilliant statistics. And interpret them properly, too! It really is as simple as that.

About This Book

This is fundamentally a reference book. Parts of the book are written as stand-alone tutorials to make it easy for you to get into whatever you’re after. Once you’re up and running with SPSS, you can skip around and read just the sections you need. You really don’t want to read straight through the entire book. That way leads to boredom. We know — we went straight through everything to write the book, and believe us, you don’t want to do that.

This book is not about math. It’s about statistics. You don’t derive anything. You don’t do any math by hand or look up numbers in statistical tables. You won’t find one explanation of how calculations are performed under the hood. This book is about the things you can do to command SPSS to calculate statistics for you. The inside truth is that you can be as dumb as a post about statistical calculation techniques and still use SPSS to produce some nifty stats!

However, if you decide to study the techniques of statistical calculation, you’ll be able to understand what SPSS does to produce numbers. Your main advantage in understanding the process to that degree of detail is that you’ll be able to choose a calculation method that more closely models the reality you’re trying to analyze — if you’re interested in reality, of course.

Throughout the book you find examples that use data stored in files. These files are freely available to you. Most of the files are installed with IBM SPSS Statistics in the SPSS installation directory, which, by default, is Program FilesSPSS (unless you chose another location during installation). A few files were designed for this book and are available on the book’s companion website (see “Beyond the Book” for more information). In every case, the files were especially designed to demonstrate some specific capability of SPSS.

Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Finally, a technical note: The official name of the product is IBM SPSS Statistics. Throughout this book, we refer to it simply as SPSS. Outside of this book, that shortcut can be risky because there are other related products also called SPSS — notably, IBM SPSS Modeler, which, though powerful and part of the same brand, is not the subject of this book.

Foolish Assumptions

This book is for anyone new to SPSS. No prior knowledge of statistics or mathematics is needed or even expected. In specific terms, we made a few assumptions about you, the reader of this book:

• You may be a student who isn’t majoring in mathematics but has been instructed to use SPSS by one of your professors.
• You may be an office worker who has been told to use SPSS to analyze some data.

For most people who generate statistics, the complexity of using the software becomes an obstacle. Our purpose in writing this book is to show you how to move that obstacle out of the way with minimum effort.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, we use icons in the margins to grab your attention. Here’s what those icons mean:

You should keep this information in mind. It’s important to what you’re doing.

This icon highlights unnecessarily geeky information, but we had to include it to complete the thought. You can skip anything marked with this icon unless the text makes you curious.

This icon highlights a point that can save you time and effort.

Anything marked with this icon offers information about something that can sneak up and bite you.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/spss for information on variable levels of measurement, commonly used procedures within the Analyze menu, and possible conclusions that you can reach after conducting a statistical test. We also provide free articles on the web at www.dummies.com/extras/spss , on topics such as automatic recode, creating your own table look, and more. Finally, you can download data files that don’t come with SPSS at www.dummies.com/go/spss.

Where to Go from Here

We recommend starting out by reading Chapter 1, so you understand what SPSS is. (We tried to leave out the boring parts.) If you haven’t already installed SPSS, check out Chapter 2. Read the stuff in Chapter 4 about defining variables and entering data — it all makes sense once you get the hang of it, but the process seems kind of screwy until you see how it works. And from there, use the Table of Contents and Index to find the things you want to do!

If you have a question about the data, or if you want to contact us about some other question you may have, you can reach Keith McCormick at [email protected].