SPSS Data Analysis for Beginners Course
SPSS is short for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and it’s used by various kinds of researchers for complex statistical data analysis. The SPSS software package was created for the management and statistical analysis of social science data. It was originally launched in 1968 by SPSS Inc., and was later acquired by IBM in 2009.
Officially dubbed IBM SPSS Statistics, most users still refer to it as SPSS. As the world standard for social-science data analysis, SPSS is widely coveted due to its straightforward and English-like command language and impressively thorough user manual.
SPSS is used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government entities, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and many more for processing and analyzing survey data, such as you collect with an online survey platform like Alchemer.
Most top research agencies use SPSS to analyze survey data and mine text data so that they can get the most out of their research and survey projects.
What you’ll learn
– Explain the basic concepts of statistics and different levels of data measurement.
– Determine the appropriate methods of analysis for a particular type of data.
– Prepare and clean the data for analysis.
– Conduct common statistical analyses to the data.
– Report the results of hypothesis tests in the appropriate way.
– Avoid some of the common pitfalls in data analysis.
– Be equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze your own research data.
Requirements
– This course is for beginning researchers and therefore little prior knowledge in statistics, data analysis, or SPSS is assumed. I will cover the necessary knowledge in the videos. I will also include links to statistics references in case you want to learn more.
– The student should have a copy of SPSS (version 20 or later recommended).
Who is this course for?
As the title implies, this course is for people working on their very first research projects (i.e. beginners / newbies), including but not limited to:
– Students working on their research papers or dissertations
– Beginning researchers with a non-technical background
– Anyone curious about data analysis
What is so difficult about data analysis?
Many people find data analysis difficult, and with good reasons. Data analysis is difficult because it is not a single discipline. It is multi-disciplinary, which means that it requires integrated knowledge from different fields in order to do it right. Specifically, to conduct data analysis for your research you need:
– Knowledge in the data analysis software (e.g. SPSS, Excel, R, etc.)
– Knowledge in statistics concepts
– Knowledge in research methods
– Experience and skills working with data
What you need is not only knowledge in separate fields, but also experience and skills integrating these knowledge together to deal with real life data.
How may this course help?
This course is designed to be concise and practical. I am not attempting to tell you everything about statistics, SPSS, data analysis, and research – that would make your learning journey unnecessarily difficult. Instead, I am going to guide you, in an structured and practical way, through the minimal set of knowledge and skills you would need to analyze your own data. This course will not make you an expert in statistics, SPSS, data analysis, and research, but it will help you finish your own data analysis.
