ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways in which researchers can collect data, but statistics analysers haven't spent much time on what they do with this data once it's collected. It also focuses on showing how the analysis can be done with computers, rather than by hand. There are several reasons for using computers. The first is that nearly all modern data analysis is done using specialized software, such as SPSS, Stata, or R. In some ways, SPSS resembles simple spreadsheet programs, like Excel, and new users who have experience with spreadsheets may find some functions that they recognize. The first step in analyzing a variable is to examine the frequency table. Creating a frequency table in SPSS is easy. A pie chart represents all valid categories of the variable as parts of a circle, with the percent of the circle occupied by a category based on the valid frequency of that value.
