FW: Internet Guide to SPSS for Windows

[John F Hall]

From: John F Hall [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: 13 November 2011 22:49
To: '[hidden email]'
Subject: Internet Guide to SPSS for Windows

Thought I’d share this with listers.

My para at the end is an extract from a private mail to Dr Ludwig-Mayerhofer

(Internet Guide to SPSS: http://www.lrz.de/~wlm/wlmspss.htm )
and Dr Karl Wuensch (SPSS Links: http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/spss.htm
) after I found their extensive SPSS tutorials and posted the links to the
SPSS Intros and Tutorials page
http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/spss-intros-and-tutorials.html  on my site.

John F Hall

[hidden email]
www.surveyresearch.weebly.com




From: Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Wolfgang, Prof. Dr.
[mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: 13 November 2011 20:22
To: Wuensch, Karl L; John F Hall; [hidden email]
Subject: AW: Internet Guide to SPSS for Windows

Dear Karl,

thanks for sharing your ideas.

License policies may differ from country to country. I appreciate what you
are writing about SAS, but over here in Germany SAS always has been very
expensive, both for academics and for students. I did some analyses with SAS
about 20 years ago when they were the first general statistics package to
introduce ordinal logit models, but when I got access to other software
(more specialized, such as LIMDEP or GAUSS) I quit working with SAS.

But I think it also has to do with your affiliation. Psychologists seem to
like SAS more than sociologists or economists, and I think I can remember
that its capabilities in term of ANOVA and MANOVA and all the stuff
psychologist love are awesome indeed.

To me it seems that while SAS is surviving (I wonder how, but perhaps it’s
the psychologist community) indeed most academic users are switching to
Stata or, for that matter, R.

Strangely enough, a very recent survey of statistical software teaching here
in Germany showed that six (i.e. 6) sociology departments  have their
students learn Stata, while about fity (i.e. 50) still use SPSS. And indeed,
even for me and my team at my university SPSS is still considerably cheaper
than Stata.

I very much like working with Stata as the interface, while maybe considered
‘primitive’, gives me much more freedom in the final analysis. With SPSS, it
is annoying to wait until it has even started to appear on my screen after
having started. And producing tables with more than 100 rows is a
catastrophe (with having to open a special window where you can ‘scroll’
through your tables). I still wonder why they did not stick with simple
output in the text format, as we have to do some formatting anyway. SPSS
Pivot tables are also nonsense with respect to layout.

Kind regards

Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer

--
Prof Dr Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer
Professur für Empirische Sozialforschung
Universität Siegen
Philosophische Fakultät
57068 Siegen
Tel. [phone] (Sekr.)
Fax [phone]
http://www.fb1.uni-siegen.de/soziologie/mitarbeiter/ludwig-mayerhofer/kontak
t.html?lang=de


Von: Wuensch, Karl L [mailto:[hidden email]]
Gesendet: Sonntag, 13. November 2011 19:03
An: John F Hall; [hidden email]
Cc: Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Wolfgang, Prof. Dr.
Betreff: RE: Internet Guide to SPSS for Windows

Greetings,

          For all practical purposes, SPSS has been sent to the retirement
home.  IBM has now tightened up with their site licenses, making once common
options prohibitively expensive.  For example, starting next year, students
and faculty here at ECU will no longer have the option of installing, under
our license, SPSS on their home computers.  Their choices will be to use
SPSS in our on-campus labs, our virtual lab, or purchase their own license.
IBM must be aware that this will greatly reduce future demand for SPSS.  I
speculate that they have just decided to squeeze as much money out of users
as they can before SPSS dies.

          My preferred stat-pack is SAS, and SAS gives our university a full
and free site license, including home use for faculty and students.  But
getting my colleagues to use SAS is like pulling teeth.  They just do not
want to mess with syntax.  I explain to them that they cannot access many of
the features of SPSS without syntax too, but they just look the other way.
IMHO, writing the syntax forces one to understand the underlying
mathematical model, and those who don’t should not be running the analysis.
SPSS’ GUI interface leads many to conduct analyses about which they know
nothing – or worse, know just enough to misinterpret the output in shameful
ways.

Cheers,

From: John F Hall [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 1:06 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: Wuensch, Karl L; [hidden email]
Subject: Internet Guide to SPSS for Windows

Everything is available for free download and there are lists of recommended
textbooks and dozens of links to useful resources for survey methods as well
as SPSS.  Only problem is, since IBM took over, many of the people for whom
the tutorials are intendeded are switching to Stata and R.


John F Hall

[hidden email]
www.surveyresearch.weebly.com

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