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Pallant 2005 review
[Page last updated: 22 Aug 2020]
Julie Pallant [1]
SPSS Survival Manual: a step by step guide to data analysis using SPSS version 12
(Second edition, Open University Press, 2005: ISBN 0 335 21640 4 £25.99, 318pp., spiral bound)
[Reviewed by John F Hall in SRA News, 25 Nov 2006. There is also a completely different, much longer and more detailed review of the 1st editon on this site. I have also replicated some of her examples using syntax rather than drop-down menus: these appear in the full text of Old Dog, Old Tricks and in the 5th accompanying slide show: Exercises from Julie Pallant SPSS Survival Manual elsewhere on this site. See also my comments on the 4th edition, 2010. For other recommended books see SPSS Textbooks]
In the late 1960s two postgraduates at Stanford, Norman Nie and Dale Bent, “fed up with the 'put a 1 in column 72' type command language of the programs at the time, devised a language that a political scientist would want to write to specify an analysis. They scraped together some funds and hired Tex Hull to help with coding the program. People got to hear about the program, which was superior in user interface to much that was available at the time, and requested copies….” [2]
SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was first released in the USA in 1968: in 1970 Tony Coxon brought a copy to the UK where it was installed by David Muxworthy and the late Marjorie Barritt at Ediburgh (then the only university with an IBM computer). The rest is history, as they say.
SPSS currently has around 3,000,000 users worldwide. Usage now extends far beyond the social sciences for which it was originally conceived and written. Not many people know this, but Yorkshire Water use SPSS to predict where sewage backups are most likely to occur in cellared houses next time it rains heavily!
As predicted, Julie Pallant’s book has deservedly sold in thousands: the 2nd edition has already been reprinted twice to meet demand. It is written in a very user-friendly style with clear explanations of the what, when and why of descriptive and inferential statistical procedures which will be particularly helpful to those working by themselves on their own reports and dissertations.
One word of warning: the title is a slight misnomer. This excellent book is not about SPSS, but about using SPSS to perform a wide range of statistical analyses. It assumes some prior knowledge of basic statistics and is heavily biased towards inferential statistics and statistical modelling (with some associated graphics) for researchers and students in psychology, health sciences and related areas. The bibliography confirms this.
Unless they are confronted with a compulsory statistics element or need to use advanced statistical analysis and modelling, it is not entirely suitable for researchers or students in social policy, political science, sociology or anyone whose analysis and reporting depends largely on percentages from frequency counts and contingency tables or, increasingly these days, graphic presentations.
The book skips over file design, data checking and editing: there is not very much on derived variables or graphics, and nothing at all on tabulation or macros. Without exception, all the examples and exercises use the SPSS drop-down menus (which incidentally explains why some useful, indeed essential, features of SPSS are not covered, since they are only available in syntax). For many frequently used procedures, this could be an extravagant waste of precious time when (except for those unable to spell or type, who should use PASTE) syntax is usually far quicker and safer.
Apart from a new chapter on log-linear regression and two additional paragraphs on the new Visual Bander facility for creating groups (plus a couple of new data sets, a few additional exercises and some typesetting changes) the book is unchanged from the first edition. Readers are therefore referred to my full review of the 1st edition or to the trimmed down version [3] previously published in SRA News.
Whilst working through some of the exercises in the early part of the book (for a presentation [4] to the SPSS users’ group, ASSESS) I found some cumbersome and confusing instructions and at least two errors. First, variables in the data set survey.sav used in the data transformation exercises have already been transformed: second, the variable names for the correlation exercise do not match those in the data set. This is careless, especially in a text book, and should have been spotted years ago. I also timed these exercises comparing drop-down menus with direct syntax: drop-down menus were invariably slower (typically by a factor of 10 or more). Only the scatterplot was questionably as quick.
Users of the book will learn a lot of statistical theory (and get their assessments finished) but, unless they use syntax or explore the help menus, they won’t learn much about what SPSS can really do. This won’t stop them continuing to buy it in thousands, nor should it.
[1] Dr Julie Pallant was then Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/lss/staff/staff_bios/pallant_j.html ) She is now Associate Professor and Director of the Rural Health Academic Centre at the University of Melbourne
[2] Information kindly supplied by David Muxworthy.
[3] (SRA News, Nov 2002, pages 10-11)
[4] Hall, John F, Old Dog, Old Tricks: using SPSS syntax to avoid the mouse trap :
Presentation, 10 Nov 2006, York University (ASSESS 20th annual meeting)
Julie Pallant [1]
SPSS Survival Manual: a step by step guide to data analysis using SPSS version 12
(Second edition, Open University Press, 2005: ISBN 0 335 21640 4 £25.99, 318pp., spiral bound)
[Reviewed by John F Hall in SRA News, 25 Nov 2006. There is also a completely different, much longer and more detailed review of the 1st editon on this site. I have also replicated some of her examples using syntax rather than drop-down menus: these appear in the full text of Old Dog, Old Tricks and in the 5th accompanying slide show: Exercises from Julie Pallant SPSS Survival Manual elsewhere on this site. See also my comments on the 4th edition, 2010. For other recommended books see SPSS Textbooks]
In the late 1960s two postgraduates at Stanford, Norman Nie and Dale Bent, “fed up with the 'put a 1 in column 72' type command language of the programs at the time, devised a language that a political scientist would want to write to specify an analysis. They scraped together some funds and hired Tex Hull to help with coding the program. People got to hear about the program, which was superior in user interface to much that was available at the time, and requested copies….” [2]
SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was first released in the USA in 1968: in 1970 Tony Coxon brought a copy to the UK where it was installed by David Muxworthy and the late Marjorie Barritt at Ediburgh (then the only university with an IBM computer). The rest is history, as they say.
SPSS currently has around 3,000,000 users worldwide. Usage now extends far beyond the social sciences for which it was originally conceived and written. Not many people know this, but Yorkshire Water use SPSS to predict where sewage backups are most likely to occur in cellared houses next time it rains heavily!
As predicted, Julie Pallant’s book has deservedly sold in thousands: the 2nd edition has already been reprinted twice to meet demand. It is written in a very user-friendly style with clear explanations of the what, when and why of descriptive and inferential statistical procedures which will be particularly helpful to those working by themselves on their own reports and dissertations.
One word of warning: the title is a slight misnomer. This excellent book is not about SPSS, but about using SPSS to perform a wide range of statistical analyses. It assumes some prior knowledge of basic statistics and is heavily biased towards inferential statistics and statistical modelling (with some associated graphics) for researchers and students in psychology, health sciences and related areas. The bibliography confirms this.
Unless they are confronted with a compulsory statistics element or need to use advanced statistical analysis and modelling, it is not entirely suitable for researchers or students in social policy, political science, sociology or anyone whose analysis and reporting depends largely on percentages from frequency counts and contingency tables or, increasingly these days, graphic presentations.
The book skips over file design, data checking and editing: there is not very much on derived variables or graphics, and nothing at all on tabulation or macros. Without exception, all the examples and exercises use the SPSS drop-down menus (which incidentally explains why some useful, indeed essential, features of SPSS are not covered, since they are only available in syntax). For many frequently used procedures, this could be an extravagant waste of precious time when (except for those unable to spell or type, who should use PASTE) syntax is usually far quicker and safer.
Apart from a new chapter on log-linear regression and two additional paragraphs on the new Visual Bander facility for creating groups (plus a couple of new data sets, a few additional exercises and some typesetting changes) the book is unchanged from the first edition. Readers are therefore referred to my full review of the 1st edition or to the trimmed down version [3] previously published in SRA News.
Whilst working through some of the exercises in the early part of the book (for a presentation [4] to the SPSS users’ group, ASSESS) I found some cumbersome and confusing instructions and at least two errors. First, variables in the data set survey.sav used in the data transformation exercises have already been transformed: second, the variable names for the correlation exercise do not match those in the data set. This is careless, especially in a text book, and should have been spotted years ago. I also timed these exercises comparing drop-down menus with direct syntax: drop-down menus were invariably slower (typically by a factor of 10 or more). Only the scatterplot was questionably as quick.
Users of the book will learn a lot of statistical theory (and get their assessments finished) but, unless they use syntax or explore the help menus, they won’t learn much about what SPSS can really do. This won’t stop them continuing to buy it in thousands, nor should it.
[1] Dr Julie Pallant was then Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/lss/staff/staff_bios/pallant_j.html ) She is now Associate Professor and Director of the Rural Health Academic Centre at the University of Melbourne
[2] Information kindly supplied by David Muxworthy.
[3] (SRA News, Nov 2002, pages 10-11)
[4] Hall, John F, Old Dog, Old Tricks: using SPSS syntax to avoid the mouse trap :
Presentation, 10 Nov 2006, York University (ASSESS 20th annual meeting)