Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)

SPSS is an acronym for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. It is a system that accesses and analyses data. To start with you have to create two files, data file and SPSS program file. Data file contains only data values. Example of a data file is given in the attached sheet.

The example data file example.dat contains the following data:

• SSN: between the columns 1-9
• Grade: in the column 12
• ACT Score: between the columns 28-29
• High School Rank: between the columns 38-39
• Ethnic origin: between the columns 44-48
• Age: between the columns 63-64
• Gender: in the column 69.

SPSS Program file contains the data definitions and all of the SPSS commands you wish to execute. The Example SPSS Program file example.spss contains:

DATA LIST FILE='example.dat'
/SSN 1-9
 grade 12(A)
 ACT 28-29
 hsrank 38-39
 ethnic 44-48(A)
 age 63-64
 gender 69(A).

The command DATA LIST tells SPSS where to find the data and how to read it. After the DATA LIST command are the names of the variables and their locations in the data file. In the SPSS Program file we can include the SPSS commands which we wish to execute.

Examples of the SPSS commands:

FREQUENCIES /VARIABLES= gender ethnic grade.

This FREQUENCIES command calculates the number of female and male students, how many students are White, Black, Hispanic & etc and how many students secured grades A, B, C, & etc.

MEANS ACT BY gender

This MEANS command calculates the average ACT scores of all the male and female students.

CROSSTABS /TABLES grade by ethnic.

CROSSTABS command compares the grades secured by different ethnic origin students.

T-TEST GROUPS=gender (M, F)

/VARIABLES ACT.

T-TEST command compares the ACT scores of male and female students.

DESCRIPTIVES VARIABLES= ACT hsrank ethnic age.

DESCRIPTIVES command calculates all the statistics like mean value, maximum value, minimum value and etc. for each variables.

REPORT FORMAT=LIST

/VARIABLES= SSN grade ACT hsrank /BREAK= gender.

REPORT command lists the variables separated by gender.

Running the program:

After entering the required commands in the SPSS Program file, we can run the program by typing the following commands:

$ runspss example.spss

The output of the program will be stored in example.out file. If any error occurs, then we can see the error messages in the file SPSS.log.

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