This blog is part of a lecture about descriptive statistics and exploring graphs with SPSS. Some of the data is of the students themselves, and for other graphs, I used the datasets from Andy Field’s Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics, a book I highly recommend!

Part 1: Opening a file and starting to explore a variable

In this video, I show you how to open a data set and how to start exploring a variable. The dataset we are using is from students, so I can’t share it.

Part 2: Exploring a variable

Now we can start looking at the results.

Part 3: Exploring a variable with missing values

Sometimes you have missing values in your dataset, so the valid percent score will be different.

Part 4: Histogram

The first graph we are creating is a histogram. We start with exploring grit variable.

Part 5: Bar charts

The next thing we do, is explore the grit variable a little more, now looking at the grit score per gender type.

Part 6: Graphs – Don’t deceive your reader!

Please take the settings of your axes into account! If you don’t you have the risk to deceive or mislead your reader.

Part 7: Boxplot with outliers

With the boxplot chart we get a nice overview of the distribution of our variable, and we can also detect outliers.

Part 8: Population pyramid

Finally we will make a population pyramid. For this graph, you can use the dataset from Andy Field, named Jiminy Cricket.sav.