My first time: in at the SPSS deep end (1972)

[Page last updated 6 December 2014]

The first time I ever used SPSS (not!) was in 1972, during a desperate attempt to obtain badly delayed results from a live "Life in Oxford" survey designed and conducted from scratch (under my supervision) by students on the SSRC Survey Methods Summer School at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.  Attempting such a survey (including sampling, questionnaire design, printing and collation, coding and card-punching, data editing and cleaning, analysis with SPSS) was perhaps over-ambitious: we dropped it from future summer schools.  By the final evening of the course we had barely managed to get preliminary frequency counts, but little else.
  
I wanted to have much more analysis to give students in return for all their efforts, but Clive Payne (who up to then had organised all the computing) had to leave early for a "pressing social engagement" (I think it was it was his wedding anniversary or his wife's birthday).  He handed me the only copy of the manual (first time I'd ever seen it!) and I was left on my own in the Oxford University Computer Centre with only a single operator for company.  Despite heroic efforts from both us, we obtained nothing but indecipherable error messages and I was eventually thrown out at midnight as the operator wanted to go home. 

1975 cartoon by Colin Brown, then a trainee researcher in the SSRC Survey Unit, who went on to become a researcher with the Consumer Association, then to the Policy Studies Institute and ended up as Policy Director, Office of Fair Trading. Author of the phrase "canteen culture" when researching the police.

On top of that I missed my dinner and most of the end-of-course party!  

These tutorials should help you to avoid all that. 

Perhaps I should rename the course SPSS Without Tears!

Now go to page IBM SPSS Statistics (Overview)  (brief introduction, links to SPSS materials and resources) or go to  Introduction to Survey Analysis Workshop (SPSS) and enjoy the course.