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Pallant 2007 (3rd edition)
Julie Pallant,
SPSS Survival Manual: A Step by Step Guide to Data Analysis using SPSS for Windows
(3rd edition, Open University Press, 2007)
[From SPSSX discussion, September 2009]
McGraw-Hill just sent me a review copy of the 3rd edition of Julie Pallant's SPSS Survival Manual (for SPSS 15) so that should keep me busy for a while. My extensive critical reviews of the 1st and 2nd editions (which need to be read together) are elsewhere on this site.
All drop-down menus (Yuk!) but otherwise an excellent book for desperate dissertations in psychology and multivariate inferential statistics. There's no tabulation, so it won't be much use to entry level sociologists, political scientists or survey researchers. There's no syntax either, so on both counts the SPSS materials on my website will be more helpul to the latter.
A quick look confirms all drop-down menus again, but nowhere near enough screen-dumps, especially in the early introductory chapters. Her explanantion of file construction and checking has most but not all of the right suggestions, but tortuous routing through drop-down menus. There appear to be some additional extracts from the Viewer, but I need to check the earlier editions. The little syntax that does appear is done exclusively from PASTE, but whether this is because she uses a version with syntax disabled or because she doesn't know how to use direct syntax anybody's guess.
The only tabulation is a frequency count on sex of respondent: I looked hard for a crosstab, but none could I find. OK, so I'm a smug s.o.b., but my students would have given up after page 40 or so (some long before) and still been none the wiser about SPSS or survey data.
This is a shame because the rest of the book dealing with attitude scaling and multivariate inferential statistics is superb. My irreverent subtitle would be "Attitude measurement via drop-down menus in SPSS for small surveys for dissertations if you're desperately working on your own with inadequate support or supervision." The cover brings to mind Sylvia Plath's poem, "Not Waving but Drowning" confirmed by the selection of quotes puffing the book.
SPSS Survival Manual: A Step by Step Guide to Data Analysis using SPSS for Windows
(3rd edition, Open University Press, 2007)
[From SPSSX discussion, September 2009]
McGraw-Hill just sent me a review copy of the 3rd edition of Julie Pallant's SPSS Survival Manual (for SPSS 15) so that should keep me busy for a while. My extensive critical reviews of the 1st and 2nd editions (which need to be read together) are elsewhere on this site.
All drop-down menus (Yuk!) but otherwise an excellent book for desperate dissertations in psychology and multivariate inferential statistics. There's no tabulation, so it won't be much use to entry level sociologists, political scientists or survey researchers. There's no syntax either, so on both counts the SPSS materials on my website will be more helpul to the latter.
A quick look confirms all drop-down menus again, but nowhere near enough screen-dumps, especially in the early introductory chapters. Her explanantion of file construction and checking has most but not all of the right suggestions, but tortuous routing through drop-down menus. There appear to be some additional extracts from the Viewer, but I need to check the earlier editions. The little syntax that does appear is done exclusively from PASTE, but whether this is because she uses a version with syntax disabled or because she doesn't know how to use direct syntax anybody's guess.
The only tabulation is a frequency count on sex of respondent: I looked hard for a crosstab, but none could I find. OK, so I'm a smug s.o.b., but my students would have given up after page 40 or so (some long before) and still been none the wiser about SPSS or survey data.
This is a shame because the rest of the book dealing with attitude scaling and multivariate inferential statistics is superb. My irreverent subtitle would be "Attitude measurement via drop-down menus in SPSS for small surveys for dissertations if you're desperately working on your own with inadequate support or supervision." The cover brings to mind Sylvia Plath's poem, "Not Waving but Drowning" confirmed by the selection of quotes puffing the book.