Can anyone recommend an alternative to SPSS that is similar, but less expensive?

Hi

Just intrigued as to why you'd want an alternative? Can your department not buy the licence for this/use it on campus? I guess there's statsoft - but really it depends what you're wanting to do with SPSS.

H :)

Thanks for asking - I recently finished my PhD program, so I can't purchase a single-user license at a student discount. I didn't realize there is such a huge difference in price.

There are some projects I would like to work on from home. I don't think I can still access the campus labs as an alumni.

If you're willing/able to use a programmming language a bit R might be an alternative www.r-project.org/ which is a free download. I haven't looked at it in any great detail but have been told by others that it's useful and not monstrously difficult to learn.

I'd ask your supervisor for a copy or just go to see your IT people and say that you're still working on the PhD - they won't have a clue either way.

Otherwise walminkski is often useful in these matters or may know someone who is ;-)

Hi,

I'm in agreement with clupea. I believe R is based on the S programming language, but it is open source. It does take a little effort to learn how to use, but once you write scripts to do what you want it makes data analysis much easier.  Especially if you have to repeat the same task multiple times. There's also plenty of online examples e.g. http://www.statmethods.net/