Tools of the Trade: An
Introduction to SPSS
Presenter:
Michael Duggan, Suffolk University
Mduggan@suffolk.edu
Agenda for SPSS
• What is SPSS?
• What can you do with SPSS?
• What I will show you today
What is SPSS?
• SPSS stands for “Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences”
• The SPSS home-page is: www.spss.com
What can you do with SPSS?
• Run Frequencies
• Calculate Descriptive
Statistics
• Compare Means
• Conduct Cross-Tabulations
• Recode Data
• Create Graphs and Charts
• Do T-Tests
• Conduct ANOVAs
• Run Various Type of
Regressions
And Much More!
What I will show you today!!
• Bringing your data into SPSS
• Recoding
• SPSS uses for beginners
– Admission
– Financial Aid
– Retention
Bringing your data into SPSS:
1. Go to “File” then “Open” and click on “Data”
2. Be sure that the “Files of type” is set on Excel (*.xls)
3. Click on the Excel File you want to open.
4. Either Double-Click the file name or click the “Open” button
5. Choose the name of the worksheet that your data is in.
(You can only choose one worksheet at a time)
6. Click “OK”
If you look at the botton left, you’ll see tabs
for Data View and Variable View
Data and Variable View
Data View: Allows you to examine your actual data
Variable View: Lets you review information about your
variables. Is it a string or numeric variable? Are there
labels for it? How are missing values handled?
In Variable view, you can add labels to variables so your
results will be easier to understand.
OK – let’s do something with the data. Click on
“ANALYZE”, then “DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS”
Descriptive Statistics –Frequencies: We’ll look at a
variable called “enr” which shows whether an
accepted student enrolled.
This is what the output looks like. About 26% of
the accepted freshmen actually enrolled.
What else can you do with “Frequencies”? Percentiles,
means, medians, and more.
Frequencies of SAT Math scores showing just statistics
and percentiles.
Descriptive Statistics - Crosstabs
Crosstabs- click on “Descriptive statistics” then “Crosstabs”
then put in the variable you want for the row and the variable
you want for the column. Click “Ok”.
Crosstabs –output of “rating” by “enr”.
To make “Cross-tabs” more useful, click on “cells” and “row
percentage”. Then “continue” and “Ok”
Another name for this crosstab is Admissions Yield By Rating
Compare Means: Click on “Compare Means” then “Means”
Using “Compare Means” for Financial Aid Analysis. We are getting
average institutional aid by admission rating for enrolling and nonenrolling students.
The output from “Compare Means” looks like this:
You could take that output and make a table like this one in Excel.
Financial Aid Analysis by Rating
NOT
ENROLLED
70
AVG $
3000
ENROLLED
30
AVG $
4000
YIELD
30%
9
200
1900
60
2500
23%
8
375
1500
200
2200
35%
7
148
1000
49
1500
25%
6
500
0
250
1000
33%
5
400
684
150
640
27%
RATING
10
Recoding
If you wanted to look at average financial aid award by rating and
need level, you’d need to recode the need data into groups.
You can decide what and how many need groups you are interested
in.
I’m going to use four groups to show you how the recode works.
First, click on “Transform” then “Recode” then “Into Different
Variables”
To recode “, select “Need”, type in a new name in “output variable”
and add a label name if you want. Then click on “old and new values”
Type in the range of the “old value” and a “new value” for
the need group. When done, click “continue”, then “Change”
and “Ok”
Using Recoded Need groups- I’ll re-run the Compare Means
You could then produce a report like:
Using SPSS for Retention Studies
The process for using SPSS in retention studies is very similar
to the ones we’ve discussed so far.
•Import your data into SPSS
•Pick the variables and procedures that your are interested in.
•We’ll be looking at a SPSS datafile on new FA’97 freshmen.
Retention:
Procedures:
•Frequency – can tell in one “click” percent of students that were
retained or have graduated
•Cross-tabs – can compare retention or graduation rates for
different groups of students. For example, by gender,
race/ethnicity, rating, and so forth.
Of course, you need to have the data available from your student
information system to do any of these analyses.
Frequencies
Here we have retention to the second (FA98) and retention to the fifth
year (FA01)
Cross-tabs – Retention by Group
Retention Rates by Gender
If you want a copy of the powerpoint presentation – it will be
posted to my office’s webpage at
http://www.suffolk.edu/enrres/home.html under “Presentations”.
If you can’t find it or have questions, try me at
mduggan@suffolk.edu