ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will provide instructions for getting started with SPSS. SPSS is probably the most commonly used statistical program in the field of social sciences in general (it was originally developed for the social sciences) and is used by a majority of researchers working in the field of second language research. It uses a graphical user interface (GUI) with drop-down menus that should be familiar to those who use programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel. In this chapter I will first explain how to physically get started by opening SPSS and either importing or entering your own data into the SPSS spreadsheet (data is the information you have). Another important part of getting started is being able to save data. Once you have some data to work with, this chapter then goes on to explain ways you might like to manipulate your data, such as combining columns or calculating percentages, filtering out some cases of participants that you don’t want to include in the analysis, or creating new groups from existing columns of data. The instructions throughout have been tested only with a PC (not Mac), but the SPSS interface should be similar on a Mac.
