Introduction to a variety of useful statistical ideas and techniques - Improving the User Experience through Practical Data Analytics - page 23

FIGURE 1.15
SPSS with data entered.
We now simply click on “Explore,” and we get a dialog box that says “Explore”;
see Figure 1.17 and its arrow.
SIDEBAR: SPSS—A WORLD OF BOXES
It is worth taking a moment here to note certain aspects of the dialog box that are common to all of
the statistical analysis tools we will use in SPSS. We have already noted how it is labeled “Explore;”
had you clicked, for example, on “Frequencies,” then, of course, that would have been the label on
the box. Also noteworthy is that on the left, you get a list of all the variables (columns) for which
there are data values—here, only VAR00001; were there 100 columns with data (yikes!!!), all 100
would be listed from VAR00001 through VAR00100. We can also easily change a generic name
such as VAR00001 to a “real name” such as “Satisfaction.” (We'll illustrate that [aesthetically-ori-
ented] operation in a later chapter.) You can see other rectangles within the box. There will always
be lots of them (e.g., the rectangle labeled “dependent variable”), but they differ by what statistical
operation you are doing. Finally, there are little boxes that can be clicked to get selected further
detail, such as “plots,” and there will always be an “OK” choice available to actually implement
the analysis. The OK option is grayed out in Figure 1.17 only because there are no elements in the
“Dependent List” rectangle.