SPSS for Starters

This small book addresses different kinds of datafiles, as commonly encountered in clinical research, and their data-analysis on SPSS Software. Some 15 years ago serious statistical analyses were conducted by specialist statisticians using ma- frame computers. Nowadays, there is ready access to statistical computing using personal computers or laptops, and this practice has changed boundaries between basic statistical methods that can be conveniently carried out on a pocket calculator and more advanced statistical methods that can only be executed on a computer. Clinical researchers currently perform basic statistics without professional help from a statistician, including t-tests and chi-square tests. With help of user-friendly software the step from such basic tests to more complex tests has become smaller, and more easy to take. It is our experience as masters’ and doctorate class teachers of the European College of Pharmaceutical Medicine (EC Socrates Project Lyon France) that s- dents are eager to master adequate command of statistical software for that purpose. However, doing so, albeit easy, still takes 20–50 steps from logging in to the final result, and all of these steps have to be learned in order for the procedures to be successful.