From the course: SPSS Statistics Essential Training

SPSS in context - SPSS Tutorial

From the course: SPSS Statistics Essential Training

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SPSS in context

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- [Narrator] There's a small store down the hill from me in Salt Lake City, Utah, that does brisk international business in selling T-shirts and sweatshirts to fans of heavy metal music. For over 35 years, they've kept track of their sales on yellow legal pads. And while writing things down is a great first step to tracking your data, you can do a lot more with your data once you get it into a computer. Now, for most people and most situations, that will mean a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and depending on your purposes, that may be all that you ever need. But there are some things that spreadsheets don't do very easily, like the analysis of variants, multiple regression, or hierarchical clustering, and that's where statistical applications like SPSS come in. SPSS is a popular statistical application that was developed over 50 years ago. The name SPSS originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and it was the name of both the program and the company that originally developed it before they sold it to IBM. There was also a brief period in 2009 when SPSS was referred to as PASW for Predictive Analytics Software, and I have seen people say that SPSS now stands for Statistical Product and Service Solutions, but IBM just calls it SPSS. More accurately, IBM calls it IBM SPS Statistics because IBM has other data applications like IBM SPS Modeler for data mining and text, IBM SPSS Amos for structural equation modeling, not to mention non SPSS apps like IBM Cognos Analytics for Business Intelligence, IBM Watson Studio for AI and so on. SPSS has long been a popular choice for data work in the social sciences and education and marketing as well as fields like healthcare and finance and so on. Other apps are also useful. They can include SaaS and Minitab. They can include PSPP, which is a play on the name SPSS. It's a free open source version. I've used it. I find it a little difficult to use. On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of the program's JASP and jamovi, particularly jamovi, which are both free open source applications that resemble SPSS, but run on different languages. Jamovi runs on R, and I strongly recommend it as a way of bridging between the two. Then there are languages like R and Python, which are used very often for data work, and of course, SaaS is both an app and a programming language, and the Julia programming language, which is developed for data work as well. They give you an enormous amount of power and flexibility, but at the cost of having to learn how to write a programming language, but that may not be on the list of people who are focusing on their research and other tasks at hand. SPSS hits a nice balance between capability of a statistically oriented program and the usability of a menu driven interface, a sweet spot that has made it very popular for many years.

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