SPSS can be used to obtain various descriptive statistics such as frequencies, mode, mean, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, kurtosis, skewedness, interquartile range, and range for each variable. Various commands are used to execute the processes. The procedure I used to get the frequencies is shown below:
- On the main menu bar click ‘Analyze’.
- Click ‘Frequencies’ and a window with a list of all variables pops up.
- Click the ‘Format’ button, and set the output format.
- Click the ‘OK’ button.
Descriptives command computed mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum for numeric variables. The Explore command on the other hand produces summary statistics and graphical display either for all cases or separately for groups of cases. Crosstabs command is useful for investigating the relationship between two or more categorical variables by providing information about the intersection of variables. The Crosstabs function uses values of a numeric or short string variable to define categories for each variable like the codes ‘1 and 2’ for gender where 1=female and 2=male. For ethnicity 1= America, 2=Asian, 3= Black, 4= Hispanic and 5=White.
The results obtained are shown in the table below:
The number of observations for each variable was 161. The mean for the grade was found to be 3 with a standard deviation of 0.00 meaning all had a grade of 3. For the profience levels, the mean for 2009-2010 was 2.40 with a standard deviation of 0.736. The majority observed was partially profience and for 2010-2011 the mean was 2.25 meaning that most of the observations for the year were partially profient. The average for the scaled reading score for 2010-2011 was 552.93 with a standard deviation of 62.409.
Learning data analysis using SPSS was quite an experience to me: I had to go through each step keenly as outlined in Trial package. I have learnt how to create data files, access pre-existing files, and create graphics and importing non SPSS data from Excel. I encountered a few challenges which made me to take more time particularly in learning the relevant commands and sub-commands. It needs significant effort to master the stepwise process. The data was presented neatly in tabular form making it easy to understand and interpret. SPSS is an easy to learn software.
