Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
APPENDIX A
Primer on SPSS
A.1 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The SPSS Web site provides a comprehensive history of the company and
the software they have produced. Here is a synopsis of that information.
SPSS, an acronym for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is a set of
statistical analysis procedures housed together within a large application.
The software was developed in 1968 by two doctoral students at Stanford
(Norman H. Nie and Dale H. Brent) and one recent Stanford graduate
(Hadlai Hull). Nie and Hull brought the software to the University of
Chicago and published the first manual in 1970. They incorporated the
company in Illinois in 1975.
SPSS began to be used on mainframe computers, the only kind of com-
puter available in many organizations such as universities. A user would
sit down at a computer terminal and type SPSS syntax (the programming
language) onto computer cards via a card-reader machine, and in the early
1980s, onto a blank screen. The syntax would look like word strings but
conformed to rules that enabled the software to perform the statistical
analysis that was specified by the syntax.
SPSS was first marketed for personal computers in 1984. The revo-
lutionary difference in that marketplace was the use of a graphical user
interface (abbreviated GUI but thought of by most people today as using
a mouse to point and click) to make selections from dialog screens. These
selections were translated “behind the scenes” to SPSS syntax, but the syn-
tax was not directly presented on the screen to the human user. However,
the code could be viewed at any time by a click of the mouse. Over the
years, SPSS has put a great deal of effort into the continuing development
of both its software and its GUI over the last quarter century, releasing
new versions on a very frequent basis. The application has been available
on both Windows and Mac platforms for many years.
A.2 DIFFERENT KINDS OF FILES AND THEIR EXTENSIONS
In working with any commercial software application, whether it is a word
processing program or SPSS, you will have occasion to deal with different
kinds of files, some of which are specific to that software. Files that you
have created have the “regular” names that you have assigned to them,
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