Customer Reviews

SPSS for Windows Step by Step: A Simple Guide and Reference 12.0 update (5th Edition)

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This is by far the best book I have found on Data Analysis with SPSS!! I would give it 10 stars if possible :-) It somehow manages the impossible of being understandable, useful and interesting both for newbies as well as experienced researchers.

First of all, it includes a quite comprehensive -more than anything else on the market, besides the manuals of SPSS of course- list of analyses (from frequencies to factor analysis, discriminant, cluster, time series, even residuals!). So, if you 're in social sciences, you need nothing that's not already there. Except for the 'new' trend, SEM, but that's a different story. Btw, could the authors, PLEASE, write a book on AMOS asap???

Secondly, for each chapter, it provides an introduction to the analysis under discussion in a way that allows people with a not so strong background in Statistics to understand what is happening; what they can and what they can't/shouldn't do, why and how they could use this analysis for their research. This is followed by a complete and detailed presentation of all the respective windows, of all the options that are frequently used. It does not confuse people by specifically talking about everything; just the things that matter. For the rest, it kindly asks the reader to consult the manuals of SPSS. Finally, for those that are not familiar with computers, it provides sequencies of the exact steps that one should follow in order to get the analysis done (it goes like, click here, press this, write that...).

Last, but definitely no way least, when the output appears, the book doesn't leave you wondering what each little cell means or what on earth are those fancy, weird -it's all greek to me;-)- terms like heteroscedasticity that appear before your eyes! In the last few pages of each chapter there are definitions and interpretation of anything that you see in the output, so that you know what your results mean.

My personal relationship with the book started 3 years ago (the 3rd edition, for SPSS 10.0, was available then) when I was desperately trying to come up with solid, scientifically valid results for my Master's Thesis in less than a month. I had little experience with SPSS at the time, but I was able not only to execute the analyses I needed, but to actually understand what was going on.

It literally saved my life two years ago (the 4th edition, SPSS 11.0), when, totally out of the blue, I -a non statistician- was asked to start teaching a relevant postgraduate course at the university where I study for my Ph.D. Honestly, I would have never, never, pulled it off without this book.

Hopefully, the new edition, which I expect to be delivered to me any day now, will be of equal help in a couple of months when I'll be trying to prove my Ph.D. thesis' conceptual framework valid.

In any case, I recommend it without the slightest reservation.

I received the book very soon after I ordered it and the book was in great condition.