SPSS

Regression is one of the most common analyses in statistics. Most of us learn it in grad school, and we learned it in a specific software. Maybe SPSS, maybe another software package. The thing is, depending on your training and when you did it, there is SO MUCH to know about doing a regression analysis in SPSS.

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You may have heard that using SPSS syntax is more efficient, gives you more control, and ultimately saves you time and frustration.  It’s all true.

….And yet you probably use SPSS because you don’t want to code.  You like the menus.

I get it.

I like the menus, too, and I use them all the time.

But I use syntax just as often.

At some point, if you want to do serious data analysis, you have to start using syntax.  (more…)

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In this 10-part tutorial, you will learn how to get started using SPSS for data preparation, analysis, and graphing. This tutorial will give you the skills to start using SPSS on your own. You will need a license to SPSS and to have it installed before you begin.

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One of the difficult decisions in mixed modeling is deciding which factors are fixed and which are random. And as difficult as it is, it’s also very important. Correctly specifying the fixed and random factors of the model is vital to obtain accurate analyses.

Now, you may be thinking of the fixed and random effects in the model, rather than the factors themselves, as fixed or random. If so, remember that each term in the model (factor, covariate, interaction or other multiplicative term) has an effect. We’ll come back to how the model measures the effects for fixed and random factors.

Sadly, the definitions in many texts don’t help much with decisions to specify factors as fixed or random. Textbook examples are often artificial and hard to apply to the real, messy data you’re working with.

Here’s the real kicker. The same factor can often be fixed or random, depending on the researcher’s objective. (more…)

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Imputation as an approach to missing data has been around for decades.

You probably learned about mean imputation in methods classes, only to be told to never do it for a variety of very good reasons. Mean imputation, in which each missing value is replaced, or imputed, with the mean of observed values of that variable, is not the only type of imputation, however. (more…)

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In your statistics class, your professor made a big deal about unequal sample sizes in one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for two reasons.

1. Because she was making you calculate everything by hand.  Sums of squares require a different formula* if sample sizes are unequal, but statistical software will automatically use the right formula. So we’re not too concerned. We’re definitely using software.

2. Nice properties in ANOVA such as the Grand Mean being the intercept in an effect-coded regression model don’t hold when data are unbalanced.  Instead of the grand mean, you need to use a weighted mean.  That’s not a big deal if you’re aware of it. (more…)

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