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Confessions of a First Time Statistics Student
May 12, 2017

Confessions of a First Time Statistics Student

Brianna Wilson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • IBM SPSS Statistics

Overall Satisfaction with IBM SPSS

Many of the professors who teach Introduction to Statistics at Grinnell College choose to use IBM SPSS as the primary statistical package for the course. SPSS is a software that fits very well with the curriculum of Introduction to Statistics. In particular, as an intro course, students enter the class from a variety of different academic disciplines. Since students are encouraged to explore their own interests in relation to topics covered in class, it is essential that SPSS is able to give them an accessible platform to do so. Furthermore, the learning curve for SPSS is relatively quick. As a student in the course, within the limited time of a semester, I learned to comfortably manage a data set in SPSS and even began to use it for my own research interests.
  • The Variable View tab of SPSS is extremely useful. It is helpful to have one location where it is possible to not only look at the variables in the data set, but also manipulate characteristics of each variable, add new labels, and even do some troubleshooting.
  • The menu-driven layout of the analysis functions makes the learning curve relatively quick. Additionally, after selecting a test, there are checkboxes that allow you to customize the output you will receive.
  • The drag and drop method of creating graphics is very intuitive and allows for users to be visualizing the graphic as they are creating it.
  • The aesthetics of the graphics created by SPSS are not easy to manipulate. Thus, it would be great if SPSS could allow you to export a graphic to another program like excel, where headings, colors, spacing can be more easily edited.
  • SPSS sometimes gives the option to generate a graphic automatically as part of the statistical test. However, the graphic created is not always accurate. For example, the automatically generated clustered bar chart for a cross-tab mistakenly clusters around dependent not independent variable.
  • One of the objectives of the Introduction to Statistics course is to give students tangible skills on a basic statistical package. Since the format of SPSS is accessible and menu-driven, students have been able to leave the class having a clear basic understanding of the program. Additionally, since SPSS has a similar menu-driven layout as other packages, students are able to more quickly learn other statistical packages.
  • Minitab
In addition to IBM SPSS, Minitab is another common package chosen by some professors for Introduction to Statistics. I found Minitab to be more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing in terms of its menu layout and output. However, Minitab is not used within as very many academic disciplines, and thus SPSS seemed to be a more useful choice for students who may be doing research in other classes or going on to do graduate research in their field.
SPSS is particularly well suited for quantitative data. More specifically, it is most useful for any type of hypothesis testing: comparing proportions, means, ANOVA, etc. The program also naturally allows for calculation of a variety of basic descriptive statistics. It is not well suited for qualitative data, because the specifications for what kind of characters can occupy a cell are very strict. That is, unlike in Excel, one could not write a note or a sentence in a cell.