If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text.
In every case, the files were especially designed to demonstrate some specific capability of SPSS. A few files were designed for this book and are available on the book’s companion website (see “Beyond the Book†for more information). Most of the files are installed with IBM SPSS Statistics in the SPSS installation directory, which, by default, is Program FilesSPSS (unless you chose another location during installation).
Throughout the book you find examples that use data stored in files. Your main advantage in understanding the process to that degree of detail is that you’ll be able to choose a calculation method that more closely models the reality you’re trying to analyze — if you’re interested in reality, of course. However, if you decide to study the techniques of statistical calculation, you’ll be able to understand what SPSS does to produce numbers. The inside truth is that you can be as dumb as a post about statistical calculation techniques and still use SPSS to produce some nifty stats! This book is about the things you can do to command SPSS to calculate statistics for you.
You won’t find one explanation of how calculations are performed under the hood. You don’t do any math by hand or look up numbers in statistical tables. We know — we went straight through everything to write the book, and believe us, you don’t want to do that. You really don’t want to read straight through the entire book. Once you’re up and running with SPSS, you can skip around and read just the sections you need. Parts of the book are written as stand-alone tutorials to make it easy for you to get into whatever you’re after.
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