User Guide

Chapter
1
Introductio
n
This guide provides a set of tutorials designed to acquaint you with the various
components of the SPSS system. You can work through the tutorials in sequence or
turn to the
topics for which you need additional information. The goal is to enable
you to perform useful analyses on your data using SPSS.
This chapter will introduce you to the basic environment of SPSS and demonstrate
atypicals
ession. We will run SPSS, retrieve a previously defined SPSS data file, and
then produce a simple statistical summary and a chart. In the process, you will learn
the roles of the primary windows within SPSS and will see a few features that smooth
the way wh
en you are running analyses.
More detailed instruction about many of the topics touched upon in this chapter
will follow in later chapters. Here, wehopetogiveyouabasicframeworkfor
understa
nding and using SPSS.
Sample Files
Most of the examples presented here use the data file demo.sav.Thisdatafileis
a fictit
ious survey of several thousand people, containing basic demographic and
consumer information.
All sample files used in these examples are located in the folder in which SPSS is
install
ed or in the tutorial\sample_files folder within the SPSS installation folder.
1