IBM SPSS Statistics

Written by Ronny Gunnarsson and first published on July 20, 2014.
Last revised on September 7, 2019.

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Suggested pre-reading	What this web page adds
Introduction to statistics Observations and variables	This web-page briefly describes the software IBM SPSS. Reading this will give you an introduction and show how to do simple tasks

SPSS = IBM SPSS Statistics is a statistical package to analyse observations with statistics. It’s original name Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) implies that that it was initially intended for the social sciences. However it is now widely used in many other disciplines as well. The company, SPSS, developing the software was bought in 2009 by IBM. hence, the current name is IBM SPSS Statistics. Here you will find basic introductions to SPSS.

Table of Contents (with links)

Overview and Entering data

The video below provides a short overview of SPSS and its different components.

Viewing data and running a frequency analysis

The video below shows how to do some common simple commands in SPSS.

Preparing an Excel file before importing it into SPSS

Ensure the first row in your Excel file only contains short column headings. If the headings are long and descriptive shorten them and keep a separate text file that explains the short column headings. Don’t have sorting mechanisms in the first row. Have a look at the video below. It may be easier to correct data errors in SPSS rather than in Excel if you have many rows. The transformation from string variables to numeric variables (in the example below recoding female and male as 1 and 0) can also be done in SPSS if you prefer to do it there. More about correcting data errors in SPSS is found on the page Clean data file.

Importing an Excel file into SPSS

The video below shows how to import the Excel file you have prepared as instructed above.

Finding errors in SPSS and creating a clean data file

Once data are in SPSS you need to ensure you have a clean data file before doing any further analysis. Please read more about it here: Clean data file.