general

SPSS is a popular software package used by graduate students in the social sciences, since it's a user-friendly software unlike some of the more complicated packages like SAS or Minitab that require programming language and a very sound understanding of statistics before you use them.

This guide is a basic guide to data analysis, and how to do this in SPSS. In fact, I would almost say that it is over simplified - almost all of these analyses can be done in Excel - except that it's not as easy to do it in Excel as it is in SPSS. Although SPSS itself may be somewhat simple compared to other stats software, the guide itself is marvelous.

The guide not only takes you through the steps of "how to" use the software package SPPS, but it also explains why you would want to run a particular analysis and how to interpret the results. It then goes on to explain how to modify those results or analysis according to your preferences.

For those people wishing to run more complex models, such as multiple regression, it is probably recommended that you know the statistical theory behind it, or are taking a class on it, rather than try to do this simply by using the guide, in order to make sure that you achieve a full understanding of the results. Because SPSS is so easy to use, it's easy to fall into the trap of having it run an analysis that is not so easy to interpret.

However, for people who are using SPSS as part of a course, this guide is absolutely great and I highly recommend it for any SPSS users, since the help function in SPSS itself is virtually useless.

This book leads you step by step to understand the statistics very well

I've found this book extremely helpful in understanding how to set up the kinds of analysis in SPSS that I want to conduct. I have the theoretical understanding to design the experiment and know what analyses need to be conducted (and could do it by hand if I had to), but this books helps me understand how to efficiently analyze my data within the program itself. Of related books I have looked at, this is the best. The one drawback is that it is designed as a classroom tool with exercises and learning points and not for the professional user. That space could be used for more information and explanation.