|
|
McGraw-Hill just sent me a review copy of the 3rd
edition of Julie Pallant's SPSS Survival Manual (for SPSS 15)
so that should keep me busy for a while. My extensive critical reviews of
the 1st and 2nd editions (which need to be read together) are on my
website at http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/8-reviews-of-spss-text-books.html
All drop-down menus (Yuk!) but otherwise an
excellent book for desperate dissertations in psychology and multivariate
inferential statistics. There's no tabulation, so it won't be much use to
entry level sociologists, political scientists or survey researchers.
There's no syntax either, so on both counts the SPSS materials http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/index-to-survey-analysis-workshop-and-spss-materials.html on
my new website will be more helpul to the latter.
A quick look at the 3rd edition confirms all drop-down menus again, but
nowhere near enough screen-dumps, especially in the early introductory
chapters. Her explanantion of file construction and checking has most but
not all of the right suggestions, but tortuous routing through drop-down
menus. There appear to be some additional extracts from the Viewer, but I
need to check the earlier editions. The little syntax that does appear is
done exclusively from PASTE, but whether this is because she uses a version with
syntax disabled or because she doesn't know how to use direct
syntax anybody's guess.
The only tabulation is a frequency count on Sex of respondent: I
looked hard for a crosstab, but none could I find. OK, so I'm a smug
s.o.b., but my students would have given up after page 40 or so (some long
before) and still been none the wiser about SPSS or survey data.
This is a shame because the rest of the book dealing with attitude scaling
and multivariate inferential statistics is superb. My
irreverent subtitle would be "Attitude measurement via drop-down menus in
SPSS for small surveys for dissertations if you're desperately working on your
own with inadequate support or supervision." The cover brings to mind
Sylvia Plath's poem, "Not Waving but Drowning" confirmed by the selection of
quotes puffing the book. .
|
Locked
