Senior College Thesis- What I know of SPSS
May 20, 2016

Senior College Thesis- What I know of SPSS

Lauren Harradine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • IBM SPSS Statistics

Overall Satisfaction with IBM SPSS

I used SPSS for my senior thesis to analyze physiology and eye tracking data. The analytics are amazing for this kind of work because I can output my data as a .txt file and import it directly to SPSS for a thorough analysis. It also allows me to export graphic representations of my data, analyze mean values and complex variants, etc. The scripting ability was also incredibly helpful, though to be honest it feels like a lot of the perks with this software are not easily discoverable to a new user.
  • Data analysis and graphic output
  • Ability to script your data analysis
  • Editing information in forms
  • Outputting to accessible external software (Excel, etc)
  • Technical tricks are not easily discoverable
  • Complicated interface (though this is fair considering how much can be done with it)
  • Variable selection can get complicated but I'm not sure how you'd fix it
  • Outputs to external software can get warped or cut off (Excel sheets export in landscape, but on a vertical page)
  • BeGaze
I used BeGaze to analyze my eye-tracking data, but that has nothing to do with statistics. In fact I exported the eye tracking data to a text delimited file and imported it to SPSS. Totally different uses, but still data analysis?
I've only seen it used in psychology research, but I'd image the highly varied options for analysis would be helpful in almost any industry. It's not the best for making fun, interesting graphs, but many people just turn to Excel or some sort of art-program like Adobe Illustrator for those situations.