When you first start SPSS, a program wizard screen will be the first thing you see.  Go ahead and go through the tutorial in order to learn how to use SPSS.  Be sure to look at the “using data editor” section.  You will have to enter the data you use yourself, so don’t worry about the chapters on “reading data” or “using distributed analysis.” 

Once you have completed the “using data editor” section, review the “working with output” section.  The other chapters will be useful, but the main problem you are likely to encounter is getting the data in properly and knowing what the output means once you run the program.

Once you exit the tutorial wizard you will be in the data editor for SPSS.  For most of our labs you will only have one or two values to enter for each line of the data editor.  That’s because we won’t be running anything too fancy in this course.  Most assignments will have 10-30 data points that are distributed in 2-4 different groups.  For example:

Control Group              Experimental Group

5                                                                     6

6                                                                     8

7                                                                    7

8                                                                    8

9                                                                    5

You will be entering the data listed above, but you must also tell the computer information about the two different groups.  We will pick a number to enter for each of the different groups we have.  So, when we enter each value we will also enter the group number.  Let’s make the control group 1.  When you enter the values from this group you must enter the number itself in one column and in the next column enter the group number.  So, when you enter the data in the data editor it should look something like this:

Line 1               5.00            1.00

Line 2               6.00            1.00

Line 3               7.00            1.00

Line 4               8.00            1.00

Line 5               9.00            1.00

Each line has one data point, and a number to indicate the group.  For the second group just continue on with line 6 for group 2.  You end up with:

Line 1               5.00            1.00

Line 2               6.00            1.00

Line 3               7.00            1.00

Line 4               8.00            1.00

Line 5               9.00            1.00

Line 6               6.00            2.00

Line 7               8.00            2.00

Line 8               7.00            2.00

Line 9               8.00            2.00

Line 10             5.00            2.00

Once you get the data into the editor you can save it as a file using the menus at the top.  You will be running statistical analysis on your data using the Analyze menu at the top of the page.  Once you run an analysis the output file will be displayed.  Be sure to review the output section of the tutorial for detailed information about the output file.  Look in each assignment file for more detail about each analysis.