Perhaps the best GUI stats suite for beginners available today
March 01, 2018

Perhaps the best GUI stats suite for beginners available today

Ho'omana Nathan Horton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • IBM SPSS Statistics

Overall Satisfaction with IBM SPSS

I'm an instructor in the English Department and the IT/research tools staff in the Linguistics Lab. I use SPSS to analyze linguistic data and I also help students use the software. We use SPSS in our Linguistics Lab primarily for statistical analyses of social sciences data, especially related to Sociolinguistics and Teaching English as a Second Language.
  • SPSS offers powerful functionality for virtually any statistical operation one needs (at least in my field, the social sciences).
  • There's also tremendous and versatile online support from both IBM themselves and others who have created helpful walkthroughs for performing various statistical analyses.
  • The output also looks nice and is fairly customizable.
  • The interface isn't very intuitive at all and is mostly just a bunch of drop-down menus with little direction. Bottom line: You really need to know about stats before you use this software. However, because it is the leading GUI stats software, there is abundant documentation for this software both from IBM and from universities and others that detail how to do various operations (and interpret the output).
SPSS has proven to be an invaluable tool for running basic statistical operations (we can do much more advanced and specific things in R), and helps us to introduce linguistics students to statistical analyses of language data.
  • R Studio
SPSS is more straightforward and user-friendly than R for basic things, so it's nice for students who just want to learn about stats or perform fairly routine or minimal statistical operations and analyses.
If you already know about statistical tests - which to choose, how to run them, and what they mean - this is an outstanding basic statistical suite. I feel that it's prohibitively expensive for an individual unless you're really doing a huge amount of complex stats, but for a university or other institution, this is a nice tool.