Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

1.4 Suggestions for using this book: Practice Makes Perfect!

This book emphasizes an active learning approach. That is, the best way to learn the skills for using SPSS is to practice them as you are reading about the various procedures introduced in this book. This book is organized as follows:

• We introduce procedures in each chapter by showing actual Screen Shots of what you will see in SPSS as each step of the procedure is completed.
• After we explain procedures, we provide short Show Me! Videos showing the steps actually being completed in SPSS
• At the end of each chapter we provide Review Me! Videos summarizing all of the procedures in that chapter.
• We present Exercises at the end of each to give you more practice performing the same procedures in the chapter, but on a different variables or a different example.

Thus, with each example, we explain the steps, show them, review them, then ask you to apply them to a new example. As you progress through each chapter, we recommend the following:

• Have SPSS open on your computer as you read the chapter.
• Do the examples yourself by completing each step in SPSS.
• Save the files of the chapter examples to help when doing end of chapter exercises.
• Take notes on the explanations of the resulting SPSS output files.

Adopting this active approach should solidify your learning how to use SPSS, as well as to help you formulate questions for your instructor if you experience any problems. Another reason to actually do the examples in the chapters is that that your instructor is likely to assign the end-of-chapter exercises as homework!

Thus, if you do the examples in the chapters, the exercises at the end of the chapter will be much easier to do. We believe that following these suggestions will greatly facilitate your learning and understanding of SPSS and interpretation of data analyses in relation to our EZDATA research project.

A word of caution here: we sometimes find that students get confused and turn in the examples that they did while reading the chapter rather than the exercises at the end of the chapter. So remember:

• The end-of-chapter exercises always involve the same procedures as the in-chapter examples, but on a different set of variables of the EZDATA file.
• Although the outputs from the end-of-chapter exercises will look similar to those of the in-chapter examples, the actual variables and statistics will be different.
• Your instructor will most likely be asking you to turn in your output file for the end-of-chapter exercises, not the in-chapter examples.