SPSS TUTORIALS
When we're writing about SPSS or statistics in general, we often wonder if our readers really understand all the terminology we use such as variance, histogram or z-scores. For those wo don't, we wrote some background tutorials on such terms. These background tutorials are listed below.
Hope you find them helpful!
In SPSS, a transformation is a command that is not immediately executed when you run it.
Transformations -but no other commands- can be combined with LOOP, DO REPEAT, DO IF and other time savers.
In SPSS, a procedure is a command that reads the data and is carried out immediately after running it. Procedures can't be used within DO REPEAT, DO IF, LOOP or TEMPORARY.
ALTER TYPE converts string variables to numeric ones.
However, it does other useful stuff too and there's some nasty pitfalls you should know. This tutorial quickly walks you through.
LAG is a function that returns the value of a previous case. It's mostly used on data with multiple rows of data per respondent. Here it comes in handy for calculating cumulative sums or counts.In SPSS, RV is short for random variable. It draws random values from a given probability distribution.
