Practical skills: Excel versus SPSS
1. Nicholas Walliman. Sociological research methods. SAGE. 2006.
I can't find words to explain how useful was our seminar on SPSS. I never worked with it before, but I'm definetely going to use it for my upcoming survey. Previously I've used Excel which doesn't suit so well for sociological analysis. For instance, it is really easy to analize the cross-tabs in SPSS. I was amazed that you can do it with a couple of "clicks"!
To find cross-tabs in Excel you have to spent much more time and I can actually show you how miserable was my life without SPSS with one example from my previous studies. Here we analized the survey on media consumption among the Russian students (March, 2012). The size of sample is really small (37), because it is only educational survey.
We have 37 sheets with answers of the each respondent and one list with simple sums of positive answers (you see it below). Basicly, we know what kind of media were consumed by respondents during the day in certain time-slots. For example, we know that some 5 people were listening to radio at 10-11 am. So we can understand basic trends like "students prefer to listen radio in the morning".
But we cannot see the cross-tabs on our sum list! If we interested in multimedia consumption, then we come to "semi-manual" usage of IF function. We look though the data if the same respondent was in same time reading newspaper and listening to the music.
That's how looks the outcome for IF function analysis. Creepy, isn't it?
Now imagine 10 sheets like this if you like to analyse 10 different cross-tabs. And what about 100 responds (100 columns on each sheet)?
Hope now you understand how it's nice to have SPSS at your service. :)
Theoretical issues:
Last lecture on quantitative methods was also really useful, especially the explanation on validity and realiability of data. But I become more and more concerned that you need to be very experienced in statistics in order to avoid the misenterpretation of quantitative data. I've started to look for some sources trying to find "manual" on quantitative research: for example, I've learned about the types of probability sampling in "Sociological research methods" [1]. But I've realised that I have to read more about that issue before conducting the survey.
Very interesting comparison between Excel and SPSS! Actually, I think that SPSS is the best tool to count the results from the surveys and see the conections between variables)
ОтветитьУдалитьMary, thanks! I agree, actually SPSS was designed for sociological analysis. I remember that me mentioned this software during our Media Technology course but never tried to use in a lab =(
ОтветитьУдалитьDiana, I love the way you compare Excel and SPSS, as at first I decided that SPSS is actually an application for Excel :)
ОтветитьУдалитьIt looks for me like SPSS was created for journalists who struggle with mathematical style of Excel (that's me!), and it instantly turns figures into visual material.
Regarding the book, Nicholas Walliman. Sociological research methods, - it is great that you found it,thabk you, it could be really helpful for my thesis paper - is it available online? Tack :)
Katya, yes, you can find it online and the lots of similar handbooks for sociologists
ОтветитьУдалить"I can't find words to explain how useful was our seminar on SPSS. I never worked with it before, but I'm definetely going to use it for my upcoming survey. Previously I've used Excel which doesn't suit so well for sociological analysis. For instance, it is really easy to analize the cross-tabs in SPSS. I was amazed that you can do it with a couple of "clicks"!"
ОтветитьУдалитьI wasn't able to go to the seminar that week because I was ill and after reading your post it seems that I really missed something. Wich group did you go to? Because when our group had the lab (on Monday) the program didn't work as proparly as it should have been I was told.