The Melody of Statistics: SPSS Guide and Statistical Tips

*This article was updated on 16.12.2021.

My friend, do you play guitar? No? (Honestly, what is happening to humanity…). Ok, but have you ever tried to learn? If you haven’t, I’ll tell you how it goes: The first six months are terrible!

You will feel like the dumbest person on the planet as you try to move from a simple “G major” chord to an “A major” chord, then to a “D major” chord (because with these three chords you can play 1,267 songs from the “Ramones”) and it will sound horrible! That’s when many people simply give up.

But… If you persist, you will eventually learn and develop the amazing ability to play an instrument and carry that ability for the rest of your life.

Statistics is exactly the same!

Just hang on and I promise that you will see how amazing statistics can be! (maybe not enough to impress during a date and it may ruin your social skills. Other than that, it’s great!).

To download your copy of “The melody of Statistics” and start your journey is super simple! Simply click here or the image below and visit the thesis writing section at LiveInnovation.org and there you will find it!

But please keep in mind: This is only an e-guide. It aims to provide support for students during research courses. Thus make sure to complement it with statistics and research methods books.

Similar to our other e-Book “Sounds Like A Thesis“, in “The Melody of Statistics” all chapters are named after songs. Pretty cool, right? For example, the introduction is called “Stop crying you heart out” (Oasis). T-test chapter is, for example, labeled as “Just the two of us” (Bill Withers). The ANOVA chapter? Well, it is called “Thee Little Birds” (Bob Marley).

Here is the full TABLE CONTENTS OF THE E-BOOK. Or better saying, the full SETLIST!

1. 1. Stop crying your hear out (Oasis): Initial considerations
   2. Ones and zeros (Jack Johnson): types of variables
   3. How often (Ben E. King): Descriptive statistics
   4. Nothing else matters (Metallica): Statistical significance
   5. No association (Silverchair): Chi-Square test
   6. Mutual motion (Loure): Correlation test
   7. Just the two of us (Bill Withers): t-test
   8. Three little birds (Bob Marley and The Wailers): One-Way ANOVA
   9. Trust me (Janis Joplin): Cronbach alpha – Reliability test
   10. We are the champions (Queen): The end

And what is even better is: you can listen to the full soundtrack on Spotify!

Still hoping for more content on statistics and SPSS? No worries at all. On the “Statistics support” section at LiveInnovation.org you will find not only the e-guide, but a series of articles on measurement, SPSS and much more.

And not only that, you will also find a YouTube series with a tutorials on how to conduct a series of tests on SPSS. Here is the series:

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SPSS Tutorial #18: Shapiro-Wilk

SPSS Tutorial #17: Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS Test)

SPSS Tutorial #16: Test for normality (Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk)

SPSS Tutorial #15: How to identify outliers in SPSS

SPSS Tutorial #14: Importing from Excel to SPSS

SPSS Tutorial #13: Levene's Test for Equality of Variances

SPSS Tutorial #12: MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance)

SPSS Tutorial #11: Factor Analysis/PCA

SPSS Tutorial #10: Chi-Square

SPSS Tutorial #9: Exporting SPSS Output to Excel, Word or PDF

SPSS Tutorial #8: Correlation

SPSS Tutorial #7: Cronbach's Alpha (Reliability test)

SPSS Tutorial #6: One-Way ANOVA

SPSS Tutorial #5: Independent Samples t-Test

SPSS Tutorial #4: Dependent (Paired) Samples t-Test

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For further explanations and more in-depth understanding of the tests, I would strongly recommend the following literature:

• Field, A. Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. Sage.
• Field, A.; Hole, G. How to Design and Report Experiments. Sage.
• Field, A. An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma. Sage.

PS: As you can see, I only recommend books from Andy Field. Simply because I think he is by far the best author on the topic (and he is also very passionate about music, despite having questionable taste. Buy his books and you will understand why!).

So we truly hope that this e-guide will help learn a bit more on statistics and how to conduct and interpret a few tests. In the future we aim to extend it, adding more tests and information.

Stay tuned! For now, enjoy the ride, have fun with the tests and discovering the beauty, or the melody, of statistics.

Life will have much more significance!