ABSTRACT
This chapter helps people to calculate: descriptive statistics in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS); bivariate correlations in SPSS; simple linear regression in SPSS; descriptive statistics in Microsoft Excel; correlations in Excel. Although many statistics can be performed in Microsoft Excel, many researchers turn to SPSS. SPSS offers three levels of classification, nominal, ordinal, and scale. If one begins simply typing data in, SPSS will automatically name the variables sequentially. The first variable will be "VAR00001", and so on. Although one can change the variable names later, it is difficult to remember what "VAR00009" stands for, so it is advisable to name the variables before one type in data. The correlation tells people that there is a relationship between the two variables, but it does not give people much predictive power. Regression is a more complicated inferential statistic that allows people to make predictions about one variable based upon the value on another.
