Introduction

This chapter reviews important information about measurement and descriptive statistics and shows how to get started using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), as well as some useful procedures for getting started with doing data analyses using SPSS. This chapter also provides an overview of the expanded high school and beyond (HSB) dataset, which will be used in this chapter and throughout the book to demonstrate the use and interpretation of the statistics that are presented. First, we provide a brief review of some key terms, as we will use them in this book. We then discuss the SPSS program to assist readers in becoming more familiar with it. Finally, we discuss a sample research problem with the HSB dataset and show how to conduct basic descriptive statistics and graphs with SPSS.