During the 03-04 Academic school year, the psychology department began using SPSS as its primary statistical package; SPSS replaced StatView and SAS as the programs taught in the department's statistical course (Research Design and Data Analysis). I used funds from the Murdock Grant to hire Reed students to create web resources to assist psychology faculty and students in their transition to SPSS from other statistical packages. These resources have proven to be quite valuable for students and faculty who are learning this new statistical program.
In previous years, psychology faculty and students had typically used StatView for their statistical analyses. StatView is a user-friendly statistical package that is somewhat limited in the range of analyses it runs. In addition, students in my Research Design and Data Analysis course also learned to use a less user-friendly but powerful program, SAS, that was capable of running a broader range of analyses. StatView, however, was no longer being supported, so the psychology department needed to replace it. With some research into various statistical programs, the psychology department decided to use SPSS as its main statistical package. In my Research Design and Data Analysis Course, I replaced both StatView and SAS with this new program; SPSS is a much more user-friendly statistical package than SAS and a much more powerful program than StatView. In other words, we gained the advantages of each in this new statistical program. (For some additional background information about our transition to SPSS see Jennifer Henderlong Corpus' Murdock Report on "SPSS Regression Models in Educational and Developmental Psychology").
To make psychology students' and faculty members' transition to using SPSS easier, a group of Reed students created a set of webpages on the Basics of SPSS. These include instructions on how to create a dataset in SPSS, how to run a variety of statistical analyses in SPSS (including descriptive statistics, correlations, t-tests, analysis of variance, and chi-squares), and how to present data using graphs and tables.
These webpages have served as a valuable resource for students in my Research Design and Data Analysis course, for faculty members learning to use SPSS, and for senior thesis students who are using SPSS to analyze their thesis data. Currently, I have a student who is working with me to update these webpages to include additional resources on running both regression and repeated measures ANOVAs with SPSS. Students and faculty members have found the current web resources to be extremely helpful and would like us to create additional resources for some of the more complicated analyses that they would like to run.