Data Matters with SPSS®

Activity 1.1

The project in Section 1.1 requires these four steps.

1. Open SPSS.
2. Enter data for the last three U.S. presidents: name, political party, and gender.
3. Use your software to calculate the proportion of the three presidents who had each name, the proportion in each political party, and the proportion of each gender. Check that the steps you used produced valid answers.
4. Use your software to create a bar chart showing the proportions found in the last step. Check that the steps you used produced valid bar charts.

Here’s how to do each step.

Step 1: Open SPSS.

Double-click the icon for SPSS. Select Type in Data. Click OK.

Step 2: Enter data for the last three U.S. presidents: name, political party, and gender.

There are two screens in the SPSS data editor. Select Data View to enter and edit data. Select Variable View to label variables. To switch between the two views, click on the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Right now, select Data View.

Click on the upper-left white rectangle. Type in a president’s name.

After you type in the name, press the right-arrow key on your keyboard to move to the next column, where you enter that president’s political party. Arrow to the right one more column and enter the president’s gender.

Press “Enter” to move to the next row, then enter the name of the second president in your data.

When you enter the name of the first president, SPSS will try to guess how long the names are for that column. That will make it so that you can type only “Bill Clinto” into that column on the next row. If this bothers you, switch to Variable View, select the Width column of the first row, and change the width from 11 to something larger, like 22. Switch back to Data View. Now you can enter the rest of President Clinton’s name. To see the entire name, though, you may have to widen that column. Click on the column’s edge in the top gray row and drag it to the right.

Once the data are all entered, switch to Variable View. The variable view looks similar to the data view, but is showing something very different. Each row has information about the nature of each variable.

Double-click on the top-left cell (where it says var0001) and type a short variable name (less than eight characters), like name. Repeat for the second variable, party, and the third, gender.

Save your data by clicking on the picture of a floppy disk in the upper-right corner.

Step 3: Use your software to calculate the proportion of the three presidents who had each name, the proportion in each political party, and the proportion of each gender. Check that the steps you used produced valid answers.

Click on Analyze and position your cursor over Descriptive Statistics. Click on Frequencies.

A new dialog box appears. Double-click on each of the three variables on the left, moving them to the right (under Variable(s): ). Click OK.

Look at the output. Make sure you can find the proportions you were looking for.

Step 4: Use your software to create a bar chart showing the proportions found in the last step. Check that the steps you used produced valid bar charts.

Select Graphs, then Bar. You want a simple bar chart, so select Define. A new dialog box appears. Select a variable, then click on the triangle near Category Axis. Click on the white dot next to % of cases. Click OK.

Select Graphs, Bar, Define again. A new dialog box appears. You need to replace the variable. First get it out of the Category Axis box by clicking on it, then the triangle. Select another variable, then click on the triangle near Category Axis. Click OK.

Repeat these steps for the last variable.

If you want, you can copy the charts by right-clicking on them, then pasting them into a Word document.