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Statistics - Brain Boggled!

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
edited March 27 in Work & Study
Hello hello, bit of a long shot with this one but hopefully somebody will know something!
I'm writing my dissertation and because it's a science-based research study I need to do some sort of statistical analysis with the results that I get from the study.

I was wondering if anybody knows what is best to use, whether it's possible to make sense of it all through Microsoft Excel or whether it would be best to use a statistics package (SPSS). The only thing with using SPSS would be that I can only get a 14-day free trial and not sure if I would be able to make sense of it in 14 days!

The whole idea of statistics makes me a bit :crazyeyes and a bit like :eek2: and people have told me that I don't really need a background in maths to be able to use it but it still confuses me.

Has anyone ever used SPSS? Or had to make sense of statistics? Can anybody recommend any books or websites that will help? Really struggling!

Muchas Gracias Amigos!
Post edited by JustV on

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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    you'll do better with SPSS than excel because it uses pretty much every statistical test known to man. the key to getting it right is making sure that you are using the right test, i.e. if you are testing for effect size, difference between groups, correlation etc. i'm not sure about websites but 'statistics without maths for psychology' is a book worth getting from the library. it tells you in really basic steps how to decide what test to use, and how to do the test in SPSS. although it's a psychology text the same principles would apply to any other topic, it's just that the examples given are from psychology studies.

    i am the least mathematically minded person in the world but i passed my statistics courses well, mainly by being calm and taking the time to read all of the instructions and keep checking at every stage.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    That's a great help thank you, will check out that book :) I was just looking around the website for SPSS package and it looked a bit complicated on it's own, but hopefully having a good book aswell will help to explain it a bit more.
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