Hi All,

I was wondering does anyone know where I can get some basic info/help with SPSS. I have a survey which I am inputting to SPSS and It consists of True/False answers, a multiple choice questionairre, case study etc. and i am sooo lost as what to do with my data. I am not sure which varibles are nominal, ordinal and scale etc. I am more confused coz my supervisor asked me to input all my data into EpiData first (i dont see WHY this was of ANY use to me) ughhhh .. ALso does anyone know if people give grids/helps with SPSS as I want to get this done ASAP as im a funded for this project and I need to have it done by april

Thanks all

nevevix :-)

Andy Field is the best source for SPSS help - he has a website with his lectures on www.statisticshell.com and definitely get his book.

However, there aren't many places that will tell you the very basics of how to enter data - if you have different types of questions.

I personally tend to treat most data as scale data. I put in any yes/no or true/false data as 0 and 1 so I can then use it in regression.

Any other data you can put in as numbers - but then use the 'values' column in 'variable view' to label the values - so you 'tell' SPSS that 1 = strongly disagree for example.


There are loads of vids on youtube though, which should help e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icgooM1K2lU&feature=related

I second the Andy Field book - it's very clear and accessible and really makes sense of how to use SPSS and how to do the data analysis. Ditto the website.

However, the first time I came to Andy Field's book I was daunted by its sheer size, and this made it difficult for me to find a way into it. A shorter and simpler book that I found useful was Julie Pallant's 'SPSS Survival Guide'. I started out by following Pallant and then referring to Field when Pallant didn't give enough detail or didn't seem clear enough. Now that I'm more confident with the basics, I've discarded Pallant and mainly use Field.

Another thing is that the help guides in the SPSS package itself are actually pretty good - much better than most software help sections. The tutorials and guides there are very clear, so that might be another place to look for guidance.

Hope that helps!