We’re often asked how you can change the appearance of the tables that SPSS generates as output. In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates two different ways to do this, either by choosing a different table look in the edit / options function, or by editing the table properties directly yourself.

In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to merge data files within SPSS Statistics using each of the two main methods, either adding cases (combining files with the same fields but additional rows) or adding variables (combining files by joining variables to a target file using something like an ID field as a ‘keyed variable’).

SPSS users often want to be able to create grouped or banded data from continuous fields such as, for example, creating age groups or income bands from continuous fields. In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to use the visual binning procedure within SPSS Statistics to do this including how to control the proportion of cases that fall into each band and how to automatically create value labels.

Recoding your data means changing the values of a variable so that they represent something else. Within SPSS Statistics there is more than one type of recode that can be performed. In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to:- Recode into the same variables, overwriting an existing variable Recode into different variables, creating a new variable in addition to your existing variables Automatically recode, a particular procedure designed to change string codes into numeric codes Visual binning, visualising a distribution in the form of a histogram and slicing it into ranged categories

When you’re deciding which tests to run on your data it’s important to understand whether your data is normally distributed or not, as a lot of standard parametrical tests assume a normal distribution whereas other non-parametric tests are designed to be run on data which is not normally distributed. A normal distribution has a number of characteristics:- It is symmetrical It is bell-shaped Its mean, median and mode all appear at the same place Normal distributions can be divided up into the same proportions by the standard deviations, so 95% of the area under the curve lies within roughly plus […]

In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to work with date and time variables in SPSS using the SPSS date and time wizard. This enables you to:- Calculate time units between two dates Add / subtract time units to or from dates Extract part of a date or a time, such as days of the week or months of the year Create date or time variables from variables holding part of dates or times

In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to use SPSS Statistics to define data filters in order to select particular cases for analysis. This can be done either to create a temporary selection or to create a permanent new file with only a subsection of cases included within it. The video demonstrates how to do this with string variables too, as well as how to combine conditions from multiple variables in your selection.

In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to reverse the values of a rating scale (such as an agreement scale or a satisfaction scale) in SPSS Statistics, so that the highest value becomes the lowest value and vice versa. Jarlath shows two methods of doing this – one using the compute procedure and the other using the recode procedure.

SPSS users often want to know how they can combine variables together. In this video Jarlath Quinn demonstrates how to use the compute procedure to calculate the mean of a number of variables to create one combined variable, and also how to use the count values procedure to count how many times a particular value occurs across a series of variables in order to create an overall count.