 Welcome to SPSS and introduction. I'm Barton Paulson. And in this course, we're going to look at the statistical program SPSS, and some of its basic functionality, and give you an idea of what it can do and how well it might work in your own data work. Now SPSS, the name deserves a little bit of explanation. Once upon a time, it stood for statistical package for the social sciences. Now it's just SPSS, but that's its origin. One important thing to know is how popular SPSS is. Here's a chart right here that comes from the excellent website r4stats.com. And what it shows is the number of scholarly articles published in 2015, using various statistical packages and languages. And what you can see here is right at the top is SPS statistics. SPSS is number one by far in terms of scholarly research. Also, you can look at jobs. Here's another chart that is also from r4stats.com. And what this shows is analytics job listings on Indeed.com in 2015, one major source of tech jobs. SPSS is on the list. But this time you see it's actually a lot lower. It's number six. And so there is a difference here between academic publishing and employment in analytics. Really, what this tells you something about the population or the audience for SPSS, the primary audience of SPSS is academic researchers, especially in the social sciences, but in other fields like business. Now there's some reasons that SPSS is popular in these fields. Number one, it's user friendly. It's got a point and click interface which allows you to assemble code really quickly. You can save that code as what's called a syntax file. And then you can reuse it, you can adapt it and you can share it with others. Also, SPSS is really well adapted for data from experiments, where you're comparing means via t tests and analysis of variants, with several important options like effect sizes and power analysis built in. And so those are some of the reasons for SPSS's popularity, especially within academic research. In sum, we can say a few things. Number one, SPSS, despite being developed about 40 years ago is still popular. It's got an easy to use interface, and it's easy to save and reuse the syntax, giving you a code basis for the work that you do within SPSS.