Exploratory Data Analysis, Basic Statistics, and Visual Displays
Daniel J. Denis · 2018
Due to SPSS's high-speed computing capabilities, a researcher can conduct a variety of exploratory analyses to immediately get an impression of their data, as well as compute a number of basic summary statistics. SPSS offers many options for graphing data and generating a variety of plots. This chapter demonstrates some of these exploratory analyses in SPSS. It presents the capabilities of the SPSS software and shows only the most essential functions for helping the researcher to make quick and immediate sense of their data. SPSS offers the Frequencies function to conduct a variety of data summary tasks. A very useful function in SPSS for obtaining descriptives as well as a host of summary plots is the Explore function. The chapter finally discusses data transformations and demonstrates how one can obtain some transformed values in SPSS and their effect on distributions.