At first, thanks so much for coming to hear my presentation. I hope it would be somewhat or somehow helpful to someone.
As we know, SPSS is not the most powerful statistical software, but I think it is the most convenient to use, especially for the beginner. Many statistician do not like SPSS since there are some statistical bug or error in it. Moreover, SPSS is like a black box, what we can do is just input the data and choose the methods or techniques we want to use. I agree that sometimes the outputs look lovely, at least to non-stats major’s students. BUT, We cannot know the EXACT PROCESS or PROCEDURE in SPSS. In another word, we do not know the details about how SPSS dea with our data, which is terrible sometimes.
The reason why many statistician do not like SPSS? I think there are following several seasons:
1. There are some statistical errors in SPSS.
2. Do not like the interface of SPSS.
3. Hypocrisy. They think “I am a statistician,so I should use a advanced software.I will lose face if someone knows I actually use SPSS at home”.
Anyway, even though there are some errors in SPSS, we have to agree that SPSS is powerful, especially useful and convenient for social icience study because it does not need to type complicated syntax.
On December 2nd, I will conduct the third and also the last workshop of this semester, Overview of SAS. Welcome to register. In this workshop,we will use a lot of syntax which may confuse you. That is OK, maybe you are not supposed to know everything about SAS in just 3 hours. But you can get familiar with that, and you could explore it by yourself in the future.
Thank all today’s participants so much, I appreciate that.
