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Babbie, Halley, Wagner and Zaino 2011
Earl Babbie, Fred S. Halley, William E Wagner III and Jeanne Zaino
Adventures in Social Research: Data Analysis Using IBM SPSS Statistics
(7th edition, Sage 2011, with associated website)
This is the latest edition and uses SPSS 18 (can be bundled with the Student Version of SPSS) but William Wagner is preparing an 8th edition using SPSS 20. An excellent book with a companion website and comprehensive coverage of the survey research process and logic of analysis as well as SPSS. Examples use real data drawn from the General Social Survey carried out annually since 1972 (except for 1979, 1981 and 1992) by the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Data are selected to be relevant to a wide range of social science interests (scaled down to enable use with the SPSS Student Edition, which is restricted to 1,500 cases and 50 variables, and which unfortunately does not have the SPSS syntax facility). On the website the General Resources page has links to the sample data sets, additional appendices and reprints of four academic papers based on GSS data.
The book is very student- and user-friendly, especially for beginners, and encourages co-operative working. At the end of each chapter there's a summary of the main points covered, a list of keywords and a set of review questions and homework assignments designed to test your understanding of concepts and procedures and to encourage further exploration of the data to answer your own research questions. This book, which uses only the GUI drop-down menus (syntax is not implemented in the student version of SPSS) has a similar pedagogic and sequential approach to the Marsh and Elliott book above and to my own Survey Analysis Workshop. It makes an excellent complement to the syntax-based tutorials on this site since it seeks to impart genuine (marketable) research skills, encourages curiosity about the social world, starts from the social research process and poses research questions and problems before moving on to solutions using SPSS. As the authors state, the purpose is to help readers to use, not be used by, computers and computer software.
See also the 5th edition:
Earl Babbie, Fred Halley and Jeanne Zaino
Adventures in Social Research: Data Analysis Using SPSS 11.0/11.5 for Windows
(5th edition, Sage 2003) uses SPSS11 for Windows, but pages can be viewed on the link and there is a review of this edition by Gill Gillespie (Northumbria University).
Adventures in Social Research: Data Analysis Using IBM SPSS Statistics
(7th edition, Sage 2011, with associated website)
This is the latest edition and uses SPSS 18 (can be bundled with the Student Version of SPSS) but William Wagner is preparing an 8th edition using SPSS 20. An excellent book with a companion website and comprehensive coverage of the survey research process and logic of analysis as well as SPSS. Examples use real data drawn from the General Social Survey carried out annually since 1972 (except for 1979, 1981 and 1992) by the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Data are selected to be relevant to a wide range of social science interests (scaled down to enable use with the SPSS Student Edition, which is restricted to 1,500 cases and 50 variables, and which unfortunately does not have the SPSS syntax facility). On the website the General Resources page has links to the sample data sets, additional appendices and reprints of four academic papers based on GSS data.
The book is very student- and user-friendly, especially for beginners, and encourages co-operative working. At the end of each chapter there's a summary of the main points covered, a list of keywords and a set of review questions and homework assignments designed to test your understanding of concepts and procedures and to encourage further exploration of the data to answer your own research questions. This book, which uses only the GUI drop-down menus (syntax is not implemented in the student version of SPSS) has a similar pedagogic and sequential approach to the Marsh and Elliott book above and to my own Survey Analysis Workshop. It makes an excellent complement to the syntax-based tutorials on this site since it seeks to impart genuine (marketable) research skills, encourages curiosity about the social world, starts from the social research process and poses research questions and problems before moving on to solutions using SPSS. As the authors state, the purpose is to help readers to use, not be used by, computers and computer software.
See also the 5th edition:
Earl Babbie, Fred Halley and Jeanne Zaino
Adventures in Social Research: Data Analysis Using SPSS 11.0/11.5 for Windows
(5th edition, Sage 2003) uses SPSS11 for Windows, but pages can be viewed on the link and there is a review of this edition by Gill Gillespie (Northumbria University).
