Grice, J. W. (2013). Handy tips for managing and analyzing your data. (Chairperson) Symposium for the 59th annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, Fort Worth, TX.


Charles A. Burdsal
Department of Psychology
Wichita State University
charles.burdsal[aatt]wichita.edu

SPSS Syntax vs Point and Click

Most students have had exposure to SPSS by the time they have taken their school’s equivalent to statistics and/or research methods.  Usually, they learn how to do descriptive statistics and frequencies using point and click.  Often those courses will include such tasks as t-tests, correlations, simple ANOVAs, etc.  There are many features not commonly taught such as how to produce a scale from several variables allowing a limited number of missing values, or how to create an edited data file.  Many such processes require syntax or a combination of syntax and point and click.  This talk includes a VERY basic introduction to syntax, a number of useful features of SPSS you probably haven’t heard of, and hopefully a fair amount of hands on experience.

SPSS syntax vs. point and click Powerpoint slides.

Example SPSS syntax files (you may need to right-click the link and select "Save target as..." from the menu. Once you have saved the file, then it should open in SPSS or a text editor):