- SPSS stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. It is a powerful window-based statistical data analysis software.
- The menu and dialog-box system of SPSS have made the program user-friendly. SPSS is particularly useful to the researchers in public health, medicine, social science and other. It supports a wide range of univariate, bivariate, multivariable and multivariate data analysis procedures.
- SPSS intended for the students, teachers and researchers involved in health and social sciences research. SPSS is basic software for statistical analysis of data. Once the data file is loaded in SPSS, the users can select items from a dropdown menu to analyze data, make graphs, transform variables, and others. SPSS, in general, has made the life of the researchers easier for data analysis.
1.1 Steps of data analysis
- We collect data for our studies using various tools and methods. The commonly used tools for data collection are questionnaires and record sheets, while the commonly used data collection methods are face-to-face interviews, observations, physical examinations and lab tests. Sometimes we use the available data (secondary data) for our research studies, for example, hospital records, and data of other studies (e.g., Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey data). Once data is collected, the steps of data analysis are:
- Data coding, if pre-coded questionnaire or record sheet is not used
- Development of data file and data entry
- Data cleaning (checking for errors in data entry)
- Data screening (checking assumptions for statistical tests)
- Data analysis
- Interpretation of results
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