Introduction to SPSS Software for Beginners (Part 1)

welcome back to my channel in today's video i present you introduction to xpss software for beginners and in this part i will show you how to load data into xpss and how to define the properties of the variables my name is titokan and this is title command solutions a youtube channel for improving the knowledge of how to do things spss is a statistical software for data analysis and it's an acronym which stands for statistical package for the social sciences it was first packaged in 1968 but since ibm had acquired it in 2009 spss is no longer an acronym by just a name called ibm spss statistics however regardless of the name change the features and functions remain unchanged now let's go to the desktop and open the spss software by double clicking on the icon this is the spss interface and there are two view windows there is data view window which usually opens by default and the variable view window the data view is the window where you enter or load in your data while the variable view is the window where you define the properties of the variables activities in these two view windows are actually what i want to show you in this video please endeavor to see or watch this video to the end this is our table of data in a spreadsheet saved as length and weight data like this this data is however not a true measurement but is created for useful application in this video here i have the following variable names id which is the identification number of the variable gender for male and female variables length of the variable and weight of the variable the data can be any type of data and must be entered and saved in ss spreadsheet for ease of access now let's go into spss and get started you can enter the data directly by typing in the data one by one and column by column which can obviously be time consuming especially if you have large data set the best option in this regard is to go to the access spreadsheet highlights the data excluding the variable names right click and copy the data then come to spss data view window right click and select paste to enter the data directly just like that the data is entered manually into spss with default name generated for each variable now let's turn to the variable view window to give the actual names to the variables and define their properties as you can see in the name column the default names are va ro1 varo2 v8ro3 and v8ro4 while the type of measure or level of measurement are all unknown this is the situation when you manually entered your data into spss workspace directly what i will do now is give appropriate names to the variables and then define their properties but there are few conditions to observe when naming variables 1. the variable names must not be more than 64 characters 2. the variable names must not have space between them instead use underscore three variable names must be unique four the variable name must not be started with a number five it must not begin with special character and six use of karma case is allowed however in this video our data has short variable names so i will click on each default variable name and change the name as appropriate the first variable is id the second variable is gender the third variable is length and the fourth variable is weight these variable names are just names for the sake of identity they do not appear anywhere in the data analysis process the next property column is variable type since our data contains only numbers then it is numeric and so i will leave this column as numeric variable type if your data contains any other variable type other than numbers you can click on the cell like this and then click on the blue buttons to open the variable type options choose the radio button for the appropriate variable type and then click ok repeat this for the remaining variables in this column and you will be done with this column the next property column is width since our data contains only numeric variables any change in this column will not have impact on the variable or the data so i may not have to change anything in this column but if your data contains strange variable type you can use this column to inform spss the number of characters or letters that is allowed in that variable column the default here is 8 and that means your string or waist must not have more than 8 letters or characters you can increase or reduce the number of characters by clicking on each cell and using the up arrow to increase it or using the down arrow to reduce it the next property column is decimals the default here is two decimals if you go back to the data view window you will see that the data for each variable is displayed at two decimal places now return to the variable view window when you click on the cell like this you can use the up arrow to increase the decimal places like this and at the data view you will see the decimal places have increased in my case i don't want any decimal in the data so i will return to the variable view window and reduce the decimals to zeros this immediately eliminates the decimal places leaving the data clean and beautiful as you can see it in the data view window the next property column is label this is one of the most important columns in spss because what you write here appears in the analysis process and in the tables and graphs in giving labels you can leave space between characters or words and you can use scientific notations or special characters when necessary so i will click on each variable cell and give the labels as follows id is identification number identification number i will leave gender as gender i will assume i am dealing with fish so i will give the labor for length as length of fish in centimeters and weight of fish in kg my liver seems to be longer than the size of the label column so i put my cursor between the label and values as you can see and drag it to the right to expand the column so that i can see my full labels the next property column now is values this is another important column in xpss because this is where you give labels to mostly categorical and ordinal variable values in our data we have only one categorical variable gender whose values we have to give labels because it is categorical and dichotomous between male and female now let's go back to the data view to inspect how many unique values are there in gender as you can see there are only two unique values that is one and two now let's return to the variable view window to give the value label click on the cell to activate the blue button then click on the blue button to open the value label dialog box like this in the value space write one and in the label space write mail then click add to associate one with me in the box again write 2 in the value space and female in the labor space then click add to associate to with female in the boss please note that the choice of labor for value is simply by personal choice so any of the labor can come first for any value when you are done with associating all the values and labels then click ok now go back to data view window and you will see all the gender values have been given male and female labels and you can toggle between the labels and values by clicking on these value labels icon at the menu bar the next column is missing this is where you fit in the missing value in your data if there are missing values in our data in the data view window there is no missing value as you can see so i will pass and move on to the next column the next column is columns this is where you can increase or decrease the size of the variable column in the data view when you click on this set like this two arrows pointing up and down appear use the up arrow to increase the value of id column to say 16 and use the down arrow to decrease the value of gender column to say 4. if you go back to the data view window you will see the id column has increased in size while the gender column has reduced in size you can also resize the columns from this data view window by placing the cursor between the id and gender column headers like this and drag to the left to reduce the size of id column and then place the cursor between the gender and length columns header like this and drag to the right to expand the gender column when you return to the variable view window you will see that the values have changed but whichever size you decided to assign to the columns ensure the data are well fitted within the columns the next column property now is align this is a column where you decide how your data is arranged in lines in each column there are three options to doing this you can align the data to the right to the center or to the left and whichever options you choose does not have direct impact on the analysis process so i will click on the right edge of each cell in this column and select center from the drop down options if you go back to the data view window you will see that the data are now aligned to the center of the columns the next property column is measure this is where you indicate the type of measure or level of measurement of each variable there are three options available in spss they are scale measure for scale variable ordinal measure for ordinal variable and nominal measure for nominal variables in this data id is a qualitative variable whose value does not represent any ranking so it is nominal variable and i will select nominal for id gender is also a qualitative variable whose value does not have ranking so it's also a nominal variable and i will select nominal measure for gender length is a numeric variable that is a measurable quantity so it is escape variable and i will select scale for length weight is also a numeric variable that is a measurable quantity so it is escape variable and i will select scale for weight the next property column is row in this column i will leave everything as input now we have completely defined the properties of the variables of the data we copied and pasted on the data view window directly and you cannot go back to the data view window to commence your data analysis but let me show you how to use the file menu options to load in the same data now click on file and from the drop down menu click on open and from the open options i click on data and this opens a dialog box called open data from here i navigate to my data folder like this my data is here in this folder but it's not visible because the files of type is in the default.sav format which is the format for spss data file now i click on the files of type column and from the drop down options i scroll down and select excel because my data is in and say and immediately my data file in excel becomes visible in the data folder as you can see now i click on the i said data file to select it and make it appear on the file name space then i click open immediately a new dialog box opens the box for read variable names from the first row of data is checked by default so before i click ok on this dialog box i ensure that i inspected my table of data to be sure the variable names are truly along the first row if in your data the variable names are not on the first row then kindly uncheck this box otherwise you are going to lose your first row data set that is your table of data will be shot by one row so since my data contains the variable names along the first row i will check this box back when i am satisfied with my inspections then i click ok and this immediately loads the data into the spreadsheet of the spss in the data view window as you can see the spss also loaded the actual variable names as they are in the excel file unlike when the spss generated default variable names when i copied and pasted the data directly here on the data view window now let's go into the variable view window once again to define the properties of this variable as you can see from the variable view window the name of the variables and the properties of the column for measure are given and defined already so what you can do now is define the properties of the variables for the remaining columns and since i have shown you how to do this before i will just quickly run through them again [Music] do [Music] [Music] now we have completely defined the properties of the variables of the data we just loaded into the spss and you cannot go back to the data view window to commence your data analysis in my next video i will be showing you how to perform data analysis using xpss now we have come to the end of this video and thanks for staying with me to this moment if you like this video and you want to see more content like this please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel so that you continue to receive notification from me every time i post new and useful content subscription is free thanks and i see you again in my next video

Channel: Titocan Mark Solutions

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Keywords: Titocan, Imhansoloeva Titocan, Tutorials, How to, Data download, Data analysis, Software, SPSS, 3D plots, 3D surfaces, software applications, Introduction to SPSS Software for Beginners, SPSS Software, Introduction to SPSS, SPSS for beginners, Data View, Variable View, Type of measure, Level of measurements, Statistical data analysis, SPSS for statistical data analysis, Value labels, Variable type, Data analysis with SPSS, Titocan Mark Solutions

Id: P6PHpQnovwQ

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021