Importance of SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science)
Kartik Vaghela
SPSS-Statistical Package for Social Science
Nearly every social science graduate student has encountered SPSS at some point in her graduate career. SPSS is an essential feature of statistical analysis for many social science researchers. It is also widely used in business. However, SPSS is also a company with many products other than the statistical package for which it is best known.
SPSS, which stands for statistical package for the social sciences, is an application that can aid in quantitative data handling. The importance of this software especially to the students of Social Science is of no bound. Before SPSS, researchers had to run statistical tests on data sets by hand. However, SPSS automates this process. Not only does SPSS allow we to run statistical tests, we can use SPSS for other purposes as well. The importances of SPSS are as following.
1. Data Collection and Organization
SPSS is often used as a data collection tool by researchers. The data entry screen in SPSS looks much like any other spreadsheet software. We can enter variables and quantitative data and save the file as a data file. Furthermore, we can organize the data in SPSS by assigning properties to different variables. For example, we can designate a variable as a nominal variable, and that information is stored in SPSS. The next time we access the data file, which could be weeks, months or even years, we'll be able to see exactly how the data is organized.
2. Data Output
Once data is collected and entered into the data sheet in SPSS, we can create an output file from the data. For example, we can create frequency distributions of the data to determine whether the data set is normally distributed. The frequency distribution is displayed in an output file. We can export items from the output file and place them into a research article we're writing. Therefore, instead of recreating a table or graph, we can take the table or graph directly from the data output file from SPSS.
3. Statistical Tests
The most obvious use for SPSS is to use the software to run statistical tests. SPSS has all of the most widely used statistical tests built-in to the software. Therefore, we won't have to do any mathematical equations by hand. Once we run a statistical test, all associated outputs are displayed in the data output file. We can also transform the data by performing advanced statistical transformations. This is especially useful for data that is not normally distributed.
Biotech College
Your rightly suggested importance of SPSS in every sphere.
We SPSS (Now PASW Version 17) is installed in our laboratory.
It is part of course in various BSc courses.
BCA students have a little of SPSS in Elective on MIS.