Re: When to use PSPP and not SPSS?

[Douglas Bonett]

I was asked to evaluate PSPP as a possible substitute for SPSS for all of our undergraduate social science statistics courses. The latest version of PSPP is a great improvement over previous versions. Here is a list of some easily fixable bugs/issues when operating in GUI mode:

When entering k columns of data one column at a time, an error message occurs when entering a value in the second row of column 2, 3, ..., k.

“pair 0” is printed instead of “pair 1” in the paired-samples t-test

Certain selected measures of association are ignored in Crosstabs. 

Change “Significance” to “Sig.” in linear regression and one-way ANOVA output to be consistent with SPSS and other PSPP analyses.

Only integer percentage confidence levels are allowed. Non-integer values (e.g. 97.5%) are needed for Bonferroni adjustments (like SPSS).

Information in all analysis-specification screens is lost when returning to those screens (as if Reset had been selected).

Confidence intervals are needed in the linear regression output (like SPSS).

A vertical line is needed after the DV variable name in the output of the independent t-test (see output of the linear contrast table in one-way ANOVA as a guide)

The following easily-programmed features are not in SPSS but are very important and would make PSPP more useful than SPSS for classroom use now that APA is requiring confidence intervals in all of its journals:

Confidence intervals for linear contrasts in one-way ANOVA

Confidence intervals for Pearson correlations

Confidence intervals for measures of association in Crosstabs for those measures where standard errors are computed.

Doug

Director, Center for Statistical Analysis in the Social Science

University of California, Santa Cruz

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all

I work for a large Norwegian college and in some circumstances, we can't use SPSS (at least for now). I have asked the researchers if they maybe could use PSPP, but they seem very sceptic. Since I don't know much about them, being an operation engineer, could someone line out the major differences between them apart from license/cost/openness etc?

Vennlige hilsener / Best regards

roy
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