IBM’s SPSS is one of the most commonly used statistical programs. Many students who write quantitatively oriented research papers, academic essays, and theses use IBM SPSS, sometimes because their institutions mandate the use of this software.
However, SPSS isn’t free, unless you have institutional access. In this blog, we’d like to recommend PSPP, a free alternative to SPSS for students who have fairly simple data analysis needs and tight budgets. PSPP was explicitly designed to resemble SPSS, so at least some of the time you invest in learning this software will transfer into SPSS. If you’re going to invest effort into learning syntax / code, though, we recommend that you save that effort for SPSS, R, Python, or Stata rather than PSPP. Just think of PSPP as a quick, free, and easy-to-use program that can let you run a fair number of statistical procedures (such as correlation, regression, and independent samples t-tests).
If you have data in Excel, you can paste them right into the PSPP data view screen:
Then, in the variables screen, you can add labels, specify types, and take other actions
Back in the data view screen, the most important feature of PSS is Analyze. As you can see, you can use PSPP to run descriptive statistics, compare means, and run regressions, but you can also undertake some more advanced features, such as K-means clustering and factor analysis.
PSPP is highly limited in terms of graphics, as it only supports scatterplots, histograms, and bar charts. What you can do with these graphics is also limited.
Of course, PSPP isn’t the only free software for statistics. R and Python are also free, at least in most configurations. However, PSPP is much easier to learn than R or Python, and, if you have to move to SPSS eventually, it provides a much better transition experience. Students who write quantitatively oriented research papers, academic essays, and theses should at least be aware of PSPP as an SPSS alternative.
BridgeText can help you with all of your statistical analysis needs.
