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SPSS Textbooks
[Page last updated 10 Jan 2012]
SPSS in 60 pages
Not really a textbook, but this handy little booklet covers the whole process of designing and running a survey. Although it's a plug for SPSS products, it's a useful prelude to the more detailed approaches in textbooks, and is clearly derived from intensive and prolonged experience of conducting and analysing surveys.
The best book I ever recommended The SPSS Guide to Data Analysis (various editions, 1987 - 1991, bought in bulk and then resold at cost to students) was written by Marija Norusis, These books are still among the best for using SPSS syntax and for following the natural process and logic of survey analysis. Second-hand copies are like gold-dust. Check eBay and Amazon for rare copies. Her SPSS for Windows books are totally different and use mainly the drop-down menus. The official SPSS guides are prohibitively expensive and not particularly suitable for beginners.:
Marija Norusis SPSS/PASW Statistics Guides
1: PASW Statistics 18 Guide to Data Analysis
2: SPSS/PASW Statistical Procedures Companion
3: PASW Statistics 18 Advanced Statistical Procedures
There are now new editions for SPSS 19
SPSS in 60 pages
Not really a textbook, but this handy little booklet covers the whole process of designing and running a survey. Although it's a plug for SPSS products, it's a useful prelude to the more detailed approaches in textbooks, and is clearly derived from intensive and prolonged experience of conducting and analysing surveys.
The best book I ever recommended The SPSS Guide to Data Analysis (various editions, 1987 - 1991, bought in bulk and then resold at cost to students) was written by Marija Norusis, These books are still among the best for using SPSS syntax and for following the natural process and logic of survey analysis. Second-hand copies are like gold-dust. Check eBay and Amazon for rare copies. Her SPSS for Windows books are totally different and use mainly the drop-down menus. The official SPSS guides are prohibitively expensive and not particularly suitable for beginners.:
Marija Norusis SPSS/PASW Statistics Guides
1: PASW Statistics 18 Guide to Data Analysis
2: SPSS/PASW Statistical Procedures Companion
3: PASW Statistics 18 Advanced Statistical Procedures
There are now new editions for SPSS 19
Other SPSS textbooks
I've done quite a bit of web-searching and discovered a plethora of available textbooks and some really good web-based tutorials for learning and using SPSS. I am currently reviewing some of the textbooks, but there's so much material around it's difficult to know where to start. I've picked out the books which seem to be aimed at (almost) beginners or which use data derived from questionnaire surveys or similar.
Most of the books I have selected approach SPSS via the drop-down menus available from the graphic user interface (GUI) Few if any include the use of syntax (the SPSS language) except indirectly via the PASTE facility. Many are basically statistics texts in various fields (psychology, medicine, [social] statistics) and mainly cover decriptive and/or inferential statistics. Few deal with problem formulation, research design, data management, file design or tabulation, specifically with data from questionnaire surveys (which was what SPSS was written and used for when it first came out in 1968).
[NB: Where authors are marked in red the links for titles are to other pages on this site containing my reviews and/or detailed comments and (where available) links to author profiles. Some links are to publishers' sites or Google Books and allow you to view extracts of the text. Some books have their own associated websites.]
There are already later editions of some of these but the ones I have chosen are:
Highly recommended:
Catherine Marsh & Jane Elliott
Exploring Data
(2nd edition, Polity Press, 2008)
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)
An excellent book with a companion website and comprehensive coverage of the survey research process and logic of analysis as well as SPSS: very student- and user-friendly, especially for beginners, and
encourages co-operative working. Uses SPSS 18 with data from the 2008 General Social Survey but with GUI, not syntax..
Julie Pallant
SPSS Survival Manual: A Step by Step Guide to Data Analysis using SPSS for Windows
(4th edition, Open University Press, 2010)
An excellent book and deserved best-seller. Very good on process, presentation and statistics, but more suited to graduate students with assigment deadlines in psychology and psychometrics than to sociology or political science and the like. Plenty of inferential statistics, but no tabulation and no syntax: whole swathes of SPSS capabilities skipped. Needs to be used in conjunction with other texts.
Andy Field
Discovering Statistics Using SPSS
(3rd ed., Sage, 2009)
. . . by far the best book combining statistics and SPSS.
Jacqueline Collier
Using SPSS Syntax: A Beginner's Guide
(Sage 2010)
. . . is really a handbook for people already familiar with the drop-down menus, but attempting to wean them over to syntax, which is far easier and quicker to use and has more facilities than those available via the menus. It's the only one to deal with dates.
Sarah Boslaugh
An intermediate guide to SPSS programming: using syntax for data management
(Sage 2005)
Like a breath of fresh air: clear and concise, nicely written and presented. Far more coverage than in other books and I particularly like the approach of posing data-management and research problems and situations
before launching into SPSS. Uses SPSS 11, but a new edition is in preparation for 18 or
later.
Worth a look (or at least get your library to purchase):
Erik Mooi and Marko Sarstedt
A Concise Guide to Market Research: The process, data and methods using IBM SPSS Statistics
(Springer-Verlag, 2011)
. . is a new book I've only just received, but it's very practice- and skill-oriented.
Alan Buckingham and Peter Saunders
The survey methods workbook: from design to analysis
(Polity Press, 2004)
Eelko Huizingh
Applied Statistics with SPSS
(Sage, 2007)
. . . is a much easier read, suitable for beginners and very easy to use.
Paul R Kinnear and Colin D Gray
PASW Statistics 17 Made Simple
(Psychology Press 2009)
. . . is a heavy duty statistics book by guys who know their way round SPSS. It's comprehensive, detailed and the examples are mainly medical.
Darren George and Paul Mallery
SPSS for Windows Step by Step: A Simple Study Guide and Reference, 17.0 Update
(10th edition, Pearson, 2009)
. . . has cursory statistical explanations, constantly referring to other texts, and has constant references to the SPSS manual. It also has irritating repetitions for every procedure of how to open SPSS. It's the only one to cover Discriminant Analysis, Cluster Analysis and Multi-Dimensional Scaling.
George Argyrous
Statistics for Research with a Guide to SPSS
(Sage, 2005)
has probably the most honest title, deals with much bigger, and real, data sets. Some of the most useful stuff is on a CD instead of in the book, and he's obviously been around SPSS a lot.
Eric L Einspruch
An Introductory Guide to SPSS for Windows
(Sage, 2005)
. . . is a nice little book for beginners and includes a fair bit of syntax (but only via PASTE)
Neil Salkind
Statistics for People Who (Think They Hate) Statistics
(Sage, 2004)
. . . is very student friendly and beautifully written
Eric Einspruch
Next Steps with SPSS
(Sage 2004)
[Only just got this, so no comments yet.]
_____________________________________________________________________
Given modern technology, all the above could be improved with full colour screenshots, graphics and colour-coded text.
Apart from Marsh and Elliott, Babbie et al., Boslaugh and Buckingham and Saunders, none of the books start from absolute scratch with where data come from in the first place (including problem formulation and research design) and, with the exception of Boslaugh and Collier, none approach SPSS from a syntax perspective. That's partly why I have prepared the tutorials on this site. These are based on the postgraduate Survey Analysis Workshop course I designed and taught (using SPSS-X on DEC and Vax mainframes) from 1976 to 1992.
They have now been greatly expanded and updated for SPSS for Windows (15, 18 and 19 (can't keep up with all these releases: 20 is due out soon!) and comprise gentle, step-by-step demonstrations (with full colour screenshots at each step) using colour-coded text and colour graphics, each step worked in both syntax and often also using the drop-down menus. There are many more tutorials for later stages to write and upload, but if you work through what's already there, you should be able to work easily with the above texts. You might even become fluent in the SPSS command language and come over to the syntax camp!
_______________________________________________________________________
Review copies awaited:
Philip H Pollack III,
An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis (Sage 2012)
Ciaran Acton, Robert Miller, John Maltby & Deirdre Fullerton (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
SPSS for Social Scientists
(Apparently out of print, but copies are still in the shops: see Review of 2009 edition by Willis Odek)
On-line text-books
Raynald Levesque and SPSS Inc.
SPSS programming and data management 4th edition: A guide for SPSS and SAS users
(SPSS Inc., 2007)
This is a a pdf file and a bit advanced for beginners, but absolutely thorough. See also the Raynald's SPSS
Tools site which is one of the best and full of handy and useful tips and downloads.
Vijay Gupta
SPSS for Beginners, (VJBooks Inc, 1999)
This is a complete 428 page textbook available as a pdf file. Although It relates to earlier releases (7 - 10) it covers quite a bit more ground than some of the others listed above. It uses GUI, not syntax, but contains dozens of full colour screenshots.
Most of the books I have selected approach SPSS via the drop-down menus available from the graphic user interface (GUI) Few if any include the use of syntax (the SPSS language) except indirectly via the PASTE facility. Many are basically statistics texts in various fields (psychology, medicine, [social] statistics) and mainly cover decriptive and/or inferential statistics. Few deal with problem formulation, research design, data management, file design or tabulation, specifically with data from questionnaire surveys (which was what SPSS was written and used for when it first came out in 1968).
[NB: Where authors are marked in red the links for titles are to other pages on this site containing my reviews and/or detailed comments and (where available) links to author profiles. Some links are to publishers' sites or Google Books and allow you to view extracts of the text. Some books have their own associated websites.]
There are already later editions of some of these but the ones I have chosen are:
Highly recommended:
Catherine Marsh & Jane Elliott
Exploring Data
(2nd edition, Polity Press, 2008)
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)
An excellent book with a companion website and comprehensive coverage of the survey research process and logic of analysis as well as SPSS: very student- and user-friendly, especially for beginners, and
encourages co-operative working. Uses SPSS 18 with data from the 2008 General Social Survey but with GUI, not syntax..
Julie Pallant
SPSS Survival Manual: A Step by Step Guide to Data Analysis using SPSS for Windows
(4th edition, Open University Press, 2010)
An excellent book and deserved best-seller. Very good on process, presentation and statistics, but more suited to graduate students with assigment deadlines in psychology and psychometrics than to sociology or political science and the like. Plenty of inferential statistics, but no tabulation and no syntax: whole swathes of SPSS capabilities skipped. Needs to be used in conjunction with other texts.
Andy Field
Discovering Statistics Using SPSS
(3rd ed., Sage, 2009)
. . . by far the best book combining statistics and SPSS.
Jacqueline Collier
Using SPSS Syntax: A Beginner's Guide
(Sage 2010)
. . . is really a handbook for people already familiar with the drop-down menus, but attempting to wean them over to syntax, which is far easier and quicker to use and has more facilities than those available via the menus. It's the only one to deal with dates.
Sarah Boslaugh
An intermediate guide to SPSS programming: using syntax for data management
(Sage 2005)
Like a breath of fresh air: clear and concise, nicely written and presented. Far more coverage than in other books and I particularly like the approach of posing data-management and research problems and situations
before launching into SPSS. Uses SPSS 11, but a new edition is in preparation for 18 or
later.
Worth a look (or at least get your library to purchase):
Erik Mooi and Marko Sarstedt
A Concise Guide to Market Research: The process, data and methods using IBM SPSS Statistics
(Springer-Verlag, 2011)
. . is a new book I've only just received, but it's very practice- and skill-oriented.
Alan Buckingham and Peter Saunders
The survey methods workbook: from design to analysis
(Polity Press, 2004)
Eelko Huizingh
Applied Statistics with SPSS
(Sage, 2007)
. . . is a much easier read, suitable for beginners and very easy to use.
Paul R Kinnear and Colin D Gray
PASW Statistics 17 Made Simple
(Psychology Press 2009)
. . . is a heavy duty statistics book by guys who know their way round SPSS. It's comprehensive, detailed and the examples are mainly medical.
Darren George and Paul Mallery
SPSS for Windows Step by Step: A Simple Study Guide and Reference, 17.0 Update
(10th edition, Pearson, 2009)
. . . has cursory statistical explanations, constantly referring to other texts, and has constant references to the SPSS manual. It also has irritating repetitions for every procedure of how to open SPSS. It's the only one to cover Discriminant Analysis, Cluster Analysis and Multi-Dimensional Scaling.
George Argyrous
Statistics for Research with a Guide to SPSS
(Sage, 2005)
has probably the most honest title, deals with much bigger, and real, data sets. Some of the most useful stuff is on a CD instead of in the book, and he's obviously been around SPSS a lot.
Eric L Einspruch
An Introductory Guide to SPSS for Windows
(Sage, 2005)
. . . is a nice little book for beginners and includes a fair bit of syntax (but only via PASTE)
Neil Salkind
Statistics for People Who (Think They Hate) Statistics
(Sage, 2004)
. . . is very student friendly and beautifully written
Eric Einspruch
Next Steps with SPSS
(Sage 2004)
[Only just got this, so no comments yet.]
_____________________________________________________________________
Given modern technology, all the above could be improved with full colour screenshots, graphics and colour-coded text.
Apart from Marsh and Elliott, Babbie et al., Boslaugh and Buckingham and Saunders, none of the books start from absolute scratch with where data come from in the first place (including problem formulation and research design) and, with the exception of Boslaugh and Collier, none approach SPSS from a syntax perspective. That's partly why I have prepared the tutorials on this site. These are based on the postgraduate Survey Analysis Workshop course I designed and taught (using SPSS-X on DEC and Vax mainframes) from 1976 to 1992.
They have now been greatly expanded and updated for SPSS for Windows (15, 18 and 19 (can't keep up with all these releases: 20 is due out soon!) and comprise gentle, step-by-step demonstrations (with full colour screenshots at each step) using colour-coded text and colour graphics, each step worked in both syntax and often also using the drop-down menus. There are many more tutorials for later stages to write and upload, but if you work through what's already there, you should be able to work easily with the above texts. You might even become fluent in the SPSS command language and come over to the syntax camp!
_______________________________________________________________________
Review copies awaited:
Philip H Pollack III,
An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis (Sage 2012)
Ciaran Acton, Robert Miller, John Maltby & Deirdre Fullerton (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
SPSS for Social Scientists
(Apparently out of print, but copies are still in the shops: see Review of 2009 edition by Willis Odek)
On-line text-books
Raynald Levesque and SPSS Inc.
SPSS programming and data management 4th edition: A guide for SPSS and SAS users
(SPSS Inc., 2007)
This is a a pdf file and a bit advanced for beginners, but absolutely thorough. See also the Raynald's SPSS
Tools site which is one of the best and full of handy and useful tips and downloads.
Vijay Gupta
SPSS for Beginners, (VJBooks Inc, 1999)
This is a complete 428 page textbook available as a pdf file. Although It relates to earlier releases (7 - 10) it covers quite a bit more ground than some of the others listed above. It uses GUI, not syntax, but contains dozens of full colour screenshots.
