PharmD Info

The “Statistical Package for the Social Sciences” (SPSS) is a package of programs for manipulating, analyzing, and presenting data; the package is widely used in the social and behavioral sciences. There are several forms of SPSS. The core program is called SPSS Base and there are a number of add-on modules that extend the range of data entry, statistical, or reporting capabilities. In our experience, the most important of these for statistical analysis are the SPSS Advanced Models and SPSS Regression Models add-on modules. SPSS Inc. also distributes stand-alone programs that work with SPSS. There are versions of SPSS for Windows (98, 2000, ME, NT, XP), major UNIX platforms (Solaris, Linux, AIX), and Macintosh. In this book, we describe the most popular, SPSS for Windows, although most features are shared by the other versions.

The analyses reported in this book are based on SPSS version 11.0.1 running under Windows 2000. By the time this book is published, there will almost certainly be later versions of SPSS available, but we are confident that the SPSS instructions given in each of the chapters will remain appropriate for the analyses described. While writing this book we have used the SPSS Base, Advanced Models, Regression Models, and the SPSS Exact Tests add-on modules. Other available add-on modules (SPSS Tables, SPSS Categories, SPSS Trends, SPSS Missing Value Analysis) were not used.