Time commitment
Less than 2 minutes
Description
The purpose of this video is to guide viewers through the process of using the "Descriptives" function in SPSS to calculate and interpret descriptive statistics for continuous variables. It demonstrates how to select variables, choose specific statistics like mean and standard deviation, and view the results in SPSS’s output window.
Video
Transcript
[Slide shows a screenshot of SPSS.]
So, we're going to start off today by looking at the “Descriptives” button. So if you have your SPSS open and you've opened your file, you're welcome to follow along. If you don't have SPSS downloaded yet, or you just want to listen, that's totally okay, you've got the slides to come back to later.
[SPSS screenshot now shows Descriptives dialog box alongside the Descriptives: Options dialog box.]
So, descriptives. If you have clicked Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Descriptives, it will take you to a dialog box that looks like this. I've also left the link to the LibGuide directly in the header here, so if you want to go to the LibGuide to get a little bit more information or view this part of the video later, it should be linked there in a few days. If you click that, you'll open up this dialog box. “Descriptives” works best for continuous variables. If you have set this up in your “Measure” in variable view properly, it should look like a little yellow ruler. What you do is you go through your list on the left-hand side of this pop-up box, you pick which variable you want some descriptive statistics for, and you click the blue arrow to put it under where it says “Variables”. You can also click the “Options” button to pop up this additional dialog box here, to tell SPSS some additional information you might want. So maybe you want the mean, maybe you want the sum, maybe you want the standard deviation. You've got a bunch of different options that you can pick, so you tell SPSS which ones you're looking for. When you're ready, you can click “Continue” and you can click “OK” and it will bump you to a page that looks like this.
[SPSS screenshot now shows the Output window interface. Below the toolbar are two panes. The left pane shows a tree style navigation menu. The right pane shows the main output table.]
So, SPSS has this kind of strange interface where, when you open it for the first time, you've got your file open, it looks kind of like an Excel spreadsheet, that's where you're looking at your data. Anytime you do something with that data, if you run an analysis, or, in this case, if you ask for descriptive statistics, it will pop up another window, a separate window. So this is confusing for folks if it's your first time using the software. You've got your DATA window and you've got your OUTPUT window. So [SPSS] will open the output window that will give you the results of what you just asked for, so we asked for descriptive statistics of Fake_Data1. It gives us how many observations we have (so “N” means number of observations), we asked for range, minimum, maximum mean, standard deviation, and variance. We've got a bunch of different information popped out on the screen here, and again, this is great for continuous variables.
[Questions? Contact us. UG Library. Website: lib.uoguelph.ca. Email: library@uoguelph.ca.]
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- Ask Chat is a collaborative service
- Ask Us Online Chat hours
- Contact Us