Great tool for statistical analysis

I was in the School of Communications at BYU, and for statistical analysis, SPSS seemed to be the standard. While I didn't ask every professor about it, SPSS was the only tool taught in the quantitative methods class at the graduate level, as well as the undergrad research class. It is a powerful tool used for running statistics for research, and while not the most user-intuitive, it is a standard in the academic community. Much like a calculator, it allows for researchers to run numbers and decide if their hypothesis is true or not.

Well, without SPSS many academics would have trouble running the numbers. While there are many stats professors who could manage, most of us in the social sciences would have to resort to other tools (such as R) to do our statistical analysis. SPSS allows for the crunching of data to happen at record speeds, giving professors the leg up on pushing out their publications.

Like I mentioned earlier, with IBM SPSS quantitative research can be much quicker and more efficient than its counterpart, qualitative. While not always the case, it is often just a matter of pushing a few buttons to get the results. While a lot more analysis and synthesis of what these numbers mean are required for the research aspect, it is comforting that as a business, the School of Communications benefited greatly with SPSS as a tool.