SPSS has been conducting a survey for the last couple of weeks to help them develop SPSS Statistics 18 (the “new” name of what has formerly just been known as SPSS 17). One generally imagines that the questions that are asked provide insight into the types of new features they are considering, (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘SPSS’
SPSS 18 New Features Survey
Friday, October 17th, 2008SPSS 17.0 Features Announced
Monday, July 14th, 2008SPSS 17.0 will feature improved research and reporting tools, greater accessibility for business users combined with new functionality for statistical programmers, and easier enterprise integration, deployment and management.
SPSS 17.0 new features will include:
- Various new algorithms, plus improved speed and performance with additional multithreaded procedures.
- New multiple imputation procedure in SPSS Missing Values that helps you more easily compelte datasets for more reliable analysis
- Updated syntax editor that makes it easier to create, test and correct syntax
- Improved integration with Microsoft Office
- New SPSS EZ RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) module to help analysts identify top customers and clients
- Ability to integrate third-party applications, procedures, and graphics packages created in R (through plug-ins)
- Enhanced administrative tools to improve IT configuration of software.
Also to be released is a new SPSS EZ RFM module, designed to help marketers use recency, frequency, and monetary value analysis to find their most valuable customers.
SPSS or Excel?
Monday, May 26th, 2008Why use a data analysis package like SPSS when you could use Excel? I’ve just come across an interesting marketing piece from SPSS that goes into benefits one gets from using a dedicated data analysis package instead of trying to do all of your analysis in a spreadsheet. While it would be fair to expect that this isn’t necessary an unbiased comparison, it might offer some food for thought to those of you trying to figure out why you should bother to upgrade. (more…)
SPSS 16 for Mac Doesn’t Make the Cut
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Bertolt Meyer has written a not-so-happy review of SPSS for the Mac 16.0. His general thesis is that it is the “most insulting piece of software” he has ever come across. He felt that it didn’t look nor act like an Macintosh application; it isn’t properly internationalized; and more than a dozen bugs. (more…)
Review of SPSS Tables 16 (SPSS add-on)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Let’s say you’re a market researcher, you have an extra $1000 lying around, and you’re looking for an easier way to improve the look, feel and efficiency of your cross-tabs. What do you buy? If you’re me, you buy the the Tables add-on for SPSS. While the text below certainly isn’t a detailed tutorial on how to use SPSS Tables, it should give you an idea of the features it makes available to help you decide whether it is worth the money. (more…)
SPSS 17.0 Drops Support for PowerPC Macs
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008SPSS announced recently to its Mac-based customers that SPSS 17.0 for Mac would not be released for the PowerPC based Mac, effectively discontinuing SPSS development for the PowerPC. PowerPC Mac users presently represent about 3% of all online computer users, down from 4.2% back in 2006 when the Intel based Mac was released. This based on the following letter which was recently e-mailed to SPSS for Mac users: (more…)
My Top 5 Free SPSS Help Web Sites
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008I spend a lot of time working in SPSS, and occasionally I need answers about various techniques and methods that aren’t readily available in the included documentation. Fortunately, there is a tremendous amount of free SPSS information and training materials scattered all over the web. Here are a few of my favorites. (more…)
SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys Webcast
Monday, March 10th, 2008Anderson Analytics and SPSS is offering a free webcast on March 20, 2008 at Noon EST in which Senior Consultant Jesse Chen will offer creative tips and tricks for analyzing unstructured (text) data. The webcast will last about an hour and will feature Chen using a variety of real-world case studies (probably integrating SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys).
SPSS 16 is now a Java Application
Thursday, October 11th, 2007…which I suppose is fine if you’re trying to run the software on Linex, or on a Macintosh, or on some other kind of platform where you only received new updates intermittently and always wished you could use the latest version.
However, if you’re on a Windows PC and are used to using a version of SPSS that is fully integrated into the Windows operating system, then the new version is a little jarring — and perhaps even a little annoying.
All of the same functionality is there as before — SPSS gets credit for that one. They must have put a lot of work into recreating every function in Java for SPSS 16. Most of the dialog boxes even look similar. All of the menus now have spiffy little icons which I’m sure will be helpful when it comes to quickly locating the option that you’re looking for.
Furthermore, all of SPSS 16 dialog boxes are resizable. All of them. Sometimes the way in which it resizes makes more sense than others, but it is especially handly to be able to resize some of the smaller dialog boxes where it was hard to see what you were doing.
Buy as a Windows user who is used to all of the Windows controls — you know, all of the standard drop down fields and the standard buttons, and the standard checkboxes — the switch to Java is a little wierd. Things in SPSS 16.0 don’t have the same feel as they used to. Things feel a little sluggish. Everything feels a bit like one of those online calculators or games that are written in Java.
But like I said before, everything seems to work. All of the buttons are in the same place they used to be. And if it speeds up the development time for new features — if it makes it possible for SPSS to meet my needs better in the future — then I’m willing to give it a shot and hope that I get used to what feels like a step backwards.
The jury is still out.
SPSS Promotes Self By Trash Talking Internet Survey Research
Saturday, July 28th, 2007SPSS recently put out a news release (which has been picked up by at least two news sites CRM Today and TMCnet) whose sole purpose appears to be to scare companies away from using the plethora of survey research tools in favor of their multi-modal survey system. How can you begin to know what your customers are thinking, reasons the release, if you only ask those who are online when hardly anyone is even using the Internet these days?
"Web-based surveys may appear to be less intrusive and easier to conduct, but without pen and paper or a good ‘old-fashioned’ telephone, organizations miss the opinions of many, including those without a computer, the forever and selectively computer illiterate and a large part of the senior population that simply missed the tech revolution."
The release goes on to remind everyone that paper and phone survey are "in many cases essential, if organizations expect to present clients with the most accurate and complete view of customer attitutes and opinions."
It then proves its point by referring to a recent Pew report:
"In fact, the Pew Internet & American Life Project recently found 49 percent of Americans only occasionally use modern gadgetry and many others bristle at electronic connectivity — the Internet."
Wow. Who would have thought that in 2007 more than half of the US population either doesn’t use and/or extremely dislikes the Internet. We all may need to rethink our online programs and go back to the phone banks, door-to-door solicitors and shopping malls many of us have mostly abandoned.
…but before we do, here are some stats not included in the SPSS release:
- Total US population is about 300 million people with 225 million of them over the age of 17. (US Census)
- There are 178.8 million web users in the US (comScore, June 2007)
- 71% of all adults are online (Pew)
- 87% of 18-24 year olds, 83% of 30-49 year olds, 65% of those 50-64 and 32% of those over 65 are online. (Pew)
- 73% of white, 62% of black, and 78% of English-speaking Hispanic are online. (Pew)
- 73% of people living in Urban/Surburban Environments and 60% living in rural areas are online. (Pew)
- 93% of those earning $75K+, 82% of those earning $50K-$74K, 69% of those earning $30K-$49K and 55% of those earning less than $30K are online. (Pew)
- Total number of households is 105.4 million (US Census)
- Almost 70% of US households have Internet access at home. (Leichtman Research Group Q1 2007)
- 53% of US households have high-speed access (Leichtman Research Group Q1 2007)
The Pew study that SPSS refers to in their release is called "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology User." The study measures not whether or not people have internet access (as implied by SPSS) but instead tries to categorize people by the degree to which information and communication technologies are utilized and enjoyed.
According to the report, only 15% of the population can be characterized as "Off the Network" — that is, individuals with neither cell phones nor internet connectivity. They tend to be in their mid-60s, nearly three-fifths are women. Only 7% have college degrees (vs. the US average of 27%) and only 4% earn over $75K a year (vs. the US average of 22%). They are the heaviest users of "old media" such as radio and TV but do not have the inclination to try new information and communication technology.
Obviously, not everyone is online and if you’re looking for a particularly special group you may want to revert to paper, pencils and phones. However, I’m thinking that for most purposes you’re going to be able to find who you’re looking for online.
But the implication of the SPSS release is that unless you use (expensive) multi-channel research techniques (provided by them?) you will be collecting bad information and misleading your clients. This isn’t true and is in fact extremely misleading.
SPSS 16 New Features
Friday, April 27th, 2007Click here to see my review of SPSS Statistics 17.0, the new version of SPSS.
In the upcoming SPSS Directions User Conference in Prague (May 16) Product Management Director Kyle Weeks will discuss some of the new features in SPSS 16. These include:
- SPSS 16 has a new Java interface allowing for Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of SPSS, a searchable Output Viewer, resizable dialogs and more;
- Improved data editor (adds find and replace capabilities to both variable view and data view). Also unicode support, import/export of Excel 2007 data, and an improved data editor;
- Syntax to change string length and data types; ability to set a permanent default working directory; elimination of short/long string distinction; ability to suppress the number of active datasets.
- More powerful statistics, including a new Neural Networks add-on module, a new Partial Least Squares algorithm, a new Cox Regression for Complex Samples module, support for algorithms written in R and improvements to Generalized Linear Models and General Estimating Equations;
- Latent Class Analysis in Amos 16
- SPSS 16.0 has improved programmability (see below)
- More integration with SPSS Predictive Enterprise Services, allowing you to store/retrieve and query to/from the Predictive Enterprise Repository via both the user interface and syntax
- Multi-threaded procedures for improved performance and scalability.
Other sources also report that SPSS 16.0 for Windows will use a new syntax editor. We can also assume that it will support Vista (since they still haven’t released a patch for SPSS 15).
SPSS has also indicated that some of the original functionality of SPSS Trends and SPSS Tables that has since been superceded by newer functionality will be eliminated. In SPSS Trends 16, the Exponential Smoothing, Autoregression, and ARIMA dialogs will be removed, while the more flexible Create Models; Apply Models; Seasonal Decomposition and Spectral Analysis dialogs will remain.
In SPSS Tables 16, Basic Tables, General Tables, Multiple Response Tables, and Tables of Frequencies will be removed, while the more flexible Custom Tables and Multiple Response Sets will remain.
It is worth noting that all of the functionality offered by the removed dialog boxes will continue to be available through syntax.
Details on the new Programmability of SPSS 16.0:
- EXTENSION command for user procedures with SPSS syntax
- Dataset features for complex data management
- New dataset class extends Python transformation program capabilities to multiple datasets
- Similar to INPUT PROGRAM but can read and write datasets
- Multiple input and output datasets
- User code written in Python
- Ability to use R procedures within SPSS through R Plug-In
- Provides ability to run R code within SPSS
- Use to take advantage of statistical capabilities in R
- Access active SPSS datset
- Write results to SPSS Viewer
- Improved implimentation of User Procedures
- Can be written in Python but specified using SPSS traditional syntax
- User never writes or sees Python code
- Used as if a built-in SPSS command
- Python module called with syntax already checked and processed by SPSS
- More general PLS module
- Dialog box interface tools coming in SPSS 17
I still wish it would be nice if they added the ability to organize variables in folders…maybe in SPSS 17?
SPSS vs. STATA
Friday, April 13th, 2007Found an interesting comparison between the features of SPSS and STATA (two statistical analysis packages), as provided by several statisticians on Windows Live Spaces:
SPSS Advantages:
- Slightly more user friendly in making complex tables & graphs
- Nice routines for testing interactions in logistic regression models
- Friendly ANOVA commands
- Generally easier to use
- Sophisticated survival analysis
STATA Advantages:
- Much easier to run a probit
- Much better documentation
- Can do a lot more procedures than SPSS
- Great company support, friendly user base
- Multiple pooled cross sectional time series routines
- Count procedures (poisson, negative binomial and zero routines)
- Maximum likelihood estimators (Tobit, multinomial logit, ordinal logit, ordinal probit)
- Huber-White correction for heteroskedascity
- More comprehensive ANOVA routines
- Cox regression
- Duration analysis procedures
- Capability to estimate models for complex surveys
- Better weighting capability (pweights vs. aweights and iweights)
- Ability to take clustering into account
- Lots of user written solutions
- Much better handling of longitudinal panel data
- Event history analysis capabilities
- Panel data analysis capabilities
- Faster development than SPSS
- Better leasing arrangement
What this all means to market researchers I cannot say — I generally in my day to day life do not use many of the statistical procedures they describe and I’ve never tried STATA.
Statistical Analysis with R
Saturday, March 24th, 2007University of Missouri graduate student Mitch Hardin recently posted a note on his blog about how after spending a lot of quality time with SPSS he switched to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a variety of platforms (Windows, MacOS, Unix).
Although R is “almost entirely command-line driven,” Mitch likes the fact that it offers more information about what is going on and there are a lot of user-defined function. Personally, I can’t imagine using a command-line to do my stats processing, but then I’m not a big one for getting things done in SPSS syntax either. I couldn’t find much evidence of people using R for marketing research, but the software is free and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work if you needed a powerful statistical package but didn’t want to spend a lot of money.
SPSS Statistics 17.0 Frustrates Me (a review)
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008I finally received my copy of SPSS Statistics 17 a couple of days ago and determined that I would try to push past my frustration with the “new and improved” Java-based interface and use it to analyze some data for a report I’m working on. But I can’t do it. There aren’t enough compelling features in the new version of SPSS to help me get past my frustration with the Java interface. So I’m sticking with SPSS 15. (more…)
Tags: review, SPSS, spss 17, SPSS 17.0, spss 18, SPSS Statistics, SPSS Statistics 17, SPSS-15, spss-16
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