Analysing Survey Data with SPSS

Who is this course for?

It is designed for postgraduate students, early career researchers and practitioners planning to work with survey data in any discipline.

Course overview and aims

This course provides an introduction to the principles and practices of undertaking quantitative data analysis of survey data in SPSS. The course combines discussion, demonstration and hands-on exercises.

Please note: Participants will need access to SPSS in order to take part in the course.

Topics

• Exploring phenomena of interest using quantitative measures
• Types of numerical data: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio variables
• Introduction to the SPSS interface
• Data entry
• Setting up an SPSS project with example data
• Getting to know the sample data using descriptive statistics
• Recoding and combing variables
• Describing the relationship between 2 variables
• Moving beyond the descriptive: understanding hypothesis testing and p-values
• Moving beyond the descriptive: running Chi-square, independent sample t-tests and ANOVAS
• Moving beyond the bivariate: running and interpreting a linear regression analysis
• Tips for writing up findings and tables

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Input and import their data into SPSS
• Explore and recode their key measures with confidence
• Interpret results of bivariate descriptive analyses and report these clearly.
• Set up a null hypothesis and interpret a p-value
• Test the relationship between two variables using appropriate inferential statistics
• Understand how to run and interpret a linear regression analysis.