PhD/PsyD SPSS

[LivingOffLoans]

Which version/package of SPSS do you recommend to a master's graduate looking to get back into research? I haven't used SPSS in four years, and would like to get and become familiar with it again before applying to Ph.D. programs.

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[Ollie123]

Which version/package of SPSS do you recommend to a master's graduate looking to get back into research? I haven't used SPSS in four years, and would like to get and become familiar with it again before applying to Ph.D. programs.

Are you asking what add-ons you might need or just how recent a version to get? I don't know where you are at in your stats training, but the basics should likely be suitable for getting back into it. If you are just asking what version number, SPSS is notoriously slow about implementing new techniques so anything in the last decade or so should be more or less the same. I think ~16 is when GEE was put in. Mixed models were around the same time. The latest one has neural networking and more options for bootstrapping though from my preliminary testing the bootstrapping seems buggy as hell (never learned about neural networks so haven't played with that yet).

If you still have a university affiliation of any kind, whatever they have available should do the trick just fine. If you are talking about purchasing on your own, save your money/ If you just want really basic stuff PSPP (free SPSS) can do it - they lag even further behind on implementation though. You can get "R" for free too - it has a MUCH steeper learning curve, but is becoming more and more popular. Since you won't know what the lab you are going into prefers, I'd focus on refreshing on stats itself rather than software since there is no guarantee they will be using SPSS. The software is the easy part these days, as long as you have the appropriate background in stats itself.