Using SPSS for Windows: Analyzing and Understanding Data (2nd Edition)

My professor gave me an "incomplete," bless him, and I had the summer to finish the project. Then I moved again and lost everything -- class notes, textbook, everything.

Then I found this book, and it was all I needed to complete most of the project. Each section describes a statistical procedure clearly, with examples. It is easy to decide whether the technique is appropriate for your data, or, as in my case, how to use your data to try a technique. Then you walk through the technique, step by step, with pictures. The book gives you annotated printouts to help you find the most useful information in what SPSS gives you.

Then, my favorite part -- a sample results section in APA style. If I hadn't had this, I would never have finished by my revised due date, and would have had to repeat the course.

Downside -- it tells you what choices to make as you go through each analysis without fully explaining the options. That's good when you're in a hurry (and I was) but I would love to see these authors make an expanded version to use when I have more time. I would like their help with choosing additional graphs, for instance.

It doesn't help with non-SPSS techniques, of course, and I certainly could have used some help with Structural Equation Modeling. I have since bought Rex Kline's excellent book for that.

If you need to do some heavyweight statistics, you have SPSS, and you find the SPSS help file impenetrable (if you can understand it, you don't need it), then this book is for you. It's worth its weight in gold, and it's heavy.


great spss book   November 23, 2000
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Green, Salkind and Akey did a great job in introducing SPSS procedures to students.

The first strength of this book is its use of research scenarios, I found that most useful because sometimes students can't automatically relate some statistical techniques with the research question.

The second strength is the extensive coverage of variety of topics. It covers most of the SPSS procedures, from graphing to descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.

The third strength, the one that can be easily ignored, is the depth of its coverage of some advanced SPSS techniques. For example, the /lmatrix method in the 2-way ANOVA simple main effects and post-hoc contrasts situation is very advanced. Most SPSS books just use the traditional way to conduct the contrast, that is, using the omnibus sum square of error term and hand-computing the new F-value. In using /lmatrix, this process is greatly simplified and more accurate.

However, this shouldn't be the only statistics book at hand when you are trying to answer your research questions. An elementary statistics book is recommended as this book is not covering the computation and rational part of the analyses. In this case, I recommend Gravetter and Wallnau's Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (5th edition).

If you use SPSS, this book is a must.