Using SPSS in Cambridge

Introduction

SPSS is a general-purpose statistical analysis package that is particularly pervasive in Humanities-based subjects. It has been around since the mid-1980s, allowing it to build up a large user base and a sizeable stock of existing resource material.

The original name of the package was the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. In early 2009, it was renamed to PASW (Predictive Analytics SoftWare). In summer 2010 it was renamed again to IBM SPSS Statistics. If you have any of these three on your computer then you have a copy of SPSS.

Availability in the University of Cambridge

SPSS is available on any MCS Windows workstation so is available for use in many computer rooms across the University; although Macintosh and Linux versions have been available in the past, recent versions have proven to be less stable in a networked environment so are no longer included in the MCS portfolio.

SPSS (for Windows or Macintosh) is also available at a heavily discounted price for staff and students from the University Computing Service Software Sales team (http://sales-web-server.csx.cam.ac.uk/software/ ).

There is an open source project, PSPP, trying to create a free version of SPSS; this is of more use to advanced users as PSPP is compatible with SPSS’ internal command language but has a very different graphical front end. PSPP can be found at this web site: http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/

Courseware

The University Computing Service runs a number of courses in SPSS. Although these are designed to be instructor-led, the handouts are comprehensive enough to allow people to work through them at their own pace.

If you would like to book a place on an instructor led course, this can be done online at http://training.cam.ac.uk/ucs/

If you would prefer to work through the material at your own pace, there are online course handouts [pdf]. You will need access to a MCS Windows workstation in order to access the data files for the exercises, though if you would prefer to work through the course notes on your own copy of SPSS these can be copied to a USB memory stick and transferred to your own computer. The files can be found by clicking on the Start button in the bottom left then clicking on the line that reads "My Computer" toward the top of the right column of the box that pops up. This opens up a window allowing you to browse through files. To navigate to the SPSS course files, double-click on "Ux on PWF-Shared (X:)" followed by "Lessons" followed by "SPSS Intro Course Data". Here you will find all the data sets used in Computing Service SPSS courses. In addition you will find a document called datadesc.doc; this document gives a full description of the data items within the dataset along with some guidance as to provenance.

Alternatives

Although SPSS is widely used within the University, other statistical packages exist. Minitab, although less powerful than SPSS, has a straightforward interface and is easy to use. R, Stata and GenStat are all more fully functional than SPSS but this extra power comes at the cost of usability. All these packages are available for use on the MCS so you can to try them out and see which best meets your needs.

The University Computing Service also runs instructor-led courses in Stata and R but has no self-teach material available currently.

Last updated: February 2011 Last checked: October 2011