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McInnes (2017)
[New page 11 June 2017]
[Page still under construction: last updated 4 July 2018]
John McInnes
An Introduction to Secondary Data Analysis with IBM SPSS Statistics
(Sage, 2017)
The companion website Student resources is open to all.
Prof MacInnes will be making amendments to the website once he has used it for teaching his course in the Oct 2017 to Feb 2018 semester. Meanwhile, to assist users of the book, some of whom may be new to survey data and/or to SPSS (and limiting myself to my own areas of expertise) I am preparing user-guides/commentaries on specific chapters (some with alternative exercises) and uploading them to this site.
To date I have prepared the following materials:
Aide-mémoire for easier navigation of companion website (1 page)
[Page re-organised 4 July 2018. Guides to chapters 4 and 5 are now on separate pages]
Chapter 4: Getting Started with SPSS
Chapter 5 Dealing with Data Documentation
Further guides/commentaries will follow. There will also be new tutorials with supplementary exercises using the same or additional data from the European Social Survey, the NORC General Social Survey and other surveys.
The book contains dozens of URLs for other sites and materials. I’ve been through the book checking the URLs, but some of these no longer exist, no longer work or have been superceded. The European Social Survey site has been heavily re-organised. Nothing happens with the links to ONS. All the ONS content has been moved to a new site. They have been moved to the National Archive site, where Sexual Identity and Guidance lists a number of publications downloadable in pdf format.
There is a full list of all the previous and current links on page MacInness 2017 (Web links)
Review and comments
This book represents a tremendous amount of development work and warrants serious study.. It is a welcome addition to the literature, not least because it uses real data from real people who have taken part in large scale European and American surveys, and who have given freely of their valuable time to answer sometimes quite long questionnaires.
MacInnes is of like mind with me in his emphasis on "learning by doing", in his use of real, not artificial data for teaching, in stressing the use of SPSS syntax and insisting on high standards of documentation and record keeping.
This echoes the pedagogical approach followed in my entry-level teach-yourself course Survey Analysis Workshop (SPSS). The book’s approach and my tutorials are mutually complementary, at least for basic data handling and analysis. The more advanced statistical modelling is perhaps above the immediate scope of my own course and its target audience, but I expect to use/refer to the book in future tutorials.
The companion website Student resources is apparently open to all, but this is no excuse not to buy the book. The videos warrant repeated viewing, if only to catch the author's gentle Scottish mutterings and asides as he explores the sites he uses and navigates and edits his own SPSS files. Students should buy the book, repeat all the exercises themselves and experiment with their own analyses. In this way they will learn the SPSS language, the joy of survey research and discover the thrill of data analysis in hot pursuit of their own research ideas.
Also on the companion website is a practice data set ESS6_Practice.sav (an SPSS saved file with 20 variables extracted from the 2012 European Social Survey Round 6). However, the website is not without some teething problems which users may find confusing, even frustrating, but which will hopefully be addressed in future editions, Some small syntax errors (which will stop SPSS working until they are corrected) have already been reported back to the author and to Sage, but they won't be corrected for some time yet.
For each chapter, the video tutorials are all on the same webpage and cannot (yet) be disaggregated. The same is true for the exercise answer videos. For instance, the video tutorials have gentle Scottish voice-overs, but are all on the same webpage (and can easily be simultaneously triggered by over-sensitive mouse pointers). They really need to be on separate pages.
Also, the sets of SPSS syntax for all analyses in each chapter are all in a single *.sav file, which is actually a *.sav.txt file: extracting these (and their sections) can be confusing and frustrating and makes for some creative workarounds. Even an experienced SPSS user like me can have difficulty navigating the website and its contents. They also need to be in separate files.
The author gives the possibly misleading impression that he is happier working with descriptive and inferential statistics than with SPSS syntax or survey research responses. This is very much a first edition and as such bears some signs of haste to meet a publication deadline and of perhaps insufficient bench-testing of tutorials on a live class of students.
[Page still under construction: last updated 4 July 2018]
John McInnes
An Introduction to Secondary Data Analysis with IBM SPSS Statistics
(Sage, 2017)
The companion website Student resources is open to all.
Prof MacInnes will be making amendments to the website once he has used it for teaching his course in the Oct 2017 to Feb 2018 semester. Meanwhile, to assist users of the book, some of whom may be new to survey data and/or to SPSS (and limiting myself to my own areas of expertise) I am preparing user-guides/commentaries on specific chapters (some with alternative exercises) and uploading them to this site.
To date I have prepared the following materials:
Aide-mémoire for easier navigation of companion website (1 page)
[Page re-organised 4 July 2018. Guides to chapters 4 and 5 are now on separate pages]
Chapter 4: Getting Started with SPSS
Chapter 5 Dealing with Data Documentation
Further guides/commentaries will follow. There will also be new tutorials with supplementary exercises using the same or additional data from the European Social Survey, the NORC General Social Survey and other surveys.
The book contains dozens of URLs for other sites and materials. I’ve been through the book checking the URLs, but some of these no longer exist, no longer work or have been superceded. The European Social Survey site has been heavily re-organised. Nothing happens with the links to ONS. All the ONS content has been moved to a new site. They have been moved to the National Archive site, where Sexual Identity and Guidance lists a number of publications downloadable in pdf format.
There is a full list of all the previous and current links on page MacInness 2017 (Web links)
Review and comments
This book represents a tremendous amount of development work and warrants serious study.. It is a welcome addition to the literature, not least because it uses real data from real people who have taken part in large scale European and American surveys, and who have given freely of their valuable time to answer sometimes quite long questionnaires.
MacInnes is of like mind with me in his emphasis on "learning by doing", in his use of real, not artificial data for teaching, in stressing the use of SPSS syntax and insisting on high standards of documentation and record keeping.
This echoes the pedagogical approach followed in my entry-level teach-yourself course Survey Analysis Workshop (SPSS). The book’s approach and my tutorials are mutually complementary, at least for basic data handling and analysis. The more advanced statistical modelling is perhaps above the immediate scope of my own course and its target audience, but I expect to use/refer to the book in future tutorials.
The companion website Student resources is apparently open to all, but this is no excuse not to buy the book. The videos warrant repeated viewing, if only to catch the author's gentle Scottish mutterings and asides as he explores the sites he uses and navigates and edits his own SPSS files. Students should buy the book, repeat all the exercises themselves and experiment with their own analyses. In this way they will learn the SPSS language, the joy of survey research and discover the thrill of data analysis in hot pursuit of their own research ideas.
Also on the companion website is a practice data set ESS6_Practice.sav (an SPSS saved file with 20 variables extracted from the 2012 European Social Survey Round 6). However, the website is not without some teething problems which users may find confusing, even frustrating, but which will hopefully be addressed in future editions, Some small syntax errors (which will stop SPSS working until they are corrected) have already been reported back to the author and to Sage, but they won't be corrected for some time yet.
For each chapter, the video tutorials are all on the same webpage and cannot (yet) be disaggregated. The same is true for the exercise answer videos. For instance, the video tutorials have gentle Scottish voice-overs, but are all on the same webpage (and can easily be simultaneously triggered by over-sensitive mouse pointers). They really need to be on separate pages.
Also, the sets of SPSS syntax for all analyses in each chapter are all in a single *.sav file, which is actually a *.sav.txt file: extracting these (and their sections) can be confusing and frustrating and makes for some creative workarounds. Even an experienced SPSS user like me can have difficulty navigating the website and its contents. They also need to be in separate files.
The author gives the possibly misleading impression that he is happier working with descriptive and inferential statistics than with SPSS syntax or survey research responses. This is very much a first edition and as such bears some signs of haste to meet a publication deadline and of perhaps insufficient bench-testing of tutorials on a live class of students.