Chapter 1

Introduction

This is a tutorial in clinical research with an emphasis on program evaluation (outcome evaluation). The software to be reviewed is the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). This package has a complete set of statistics for the psychological researcher. Further, there are many ways to accomplish any one task. This manual is limited in its attempts to present all of the possibilities--the manuals that accompany the package are more complete. The intent here is examine clinical research and SPSS is presented as a tool.

This chapter demonstrates:

                    Accessing the SPSS Program
                    Defining a set of variables
                    Entering data into the SPSS data editor .
                   Managing data.
                   Computing a t-test using SPSS.
                   Identifying results in the SPSS output.
                   Interpreting the t-test results.

Information is presented in a multimedia format. Often the same material is presented in two or three mediums. In almost all instances it will be written. If it is presented in another format there will be a highlighted word or button indicating the alternative format.

NOTE: When using the samples presented here as prototypes to create data files and job streams (syntax files), you should not use the same names for your files as the ones used here. In particular, you should not use "scale.sav" for a data file or "psysoc.sps" for a job stream.