Ronan Conroy wrote:
>However, as jverkuilen remarked, it's amazing the tribal loyalty of
>psychologists to SPSS - and their insistence that it's a really easy
>package, despite the fact that they spend ages transferring their
>results by hand to Excel to make awful bar charts. Or is this latter
>habit peculiarly Irish?
It is not.
There are a few good reasons for psych people to like SPSS, in
particular the fact that it provides easy access to some of the analyses
they do a lot, to wit RM-ANOVA and pals. But the disadvantages of it are
legion and I would dearly love to stop the next generation from going
down that road to statistical perdition. Also given the fact that
observational data are becoming more common and HLM also a more common
and flexible approach to analysis of RM data, SPSS's advantage is
slipping away. Naturally SPSS, Inc., does a good job of helping me by
constantly raising prices to the point that many universities
contemplate (or even go so far as) dropping it.
In our program we try to go out of our way to expose students to
different stats packages, at present some combination of SPSS, SAS,
Stata, R, HLM and Lisrel. Everyone gets SPSS and Stata because SPSS is
used for stat 1 and Stata is used for psychometrics.
JV
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