SPSS is a widely used software platform for statistical analysis. It is most popular in social science and education fields, and its ease of use makes it a popular choice for many courses that provide an introduction to quantitative methods.
This guide is intended to provide a basic overview to the software platform, including the import of datasets from other sources and how to create a codebook to help support research reproducibility.
There are two computers in The Digital Scholarship Collaboratory (on Mudd 2 in the Library) that have SPSS installed and are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Several of the individual colleges also offer SPSS in their labs and provide free or discounted student licenses for personal laptops. Check in with your home campus IT department for more information. .
These are the native SPSS file formats, but SPSS can also import from a variety of other statistical packages as well as CSV and Excel files.
| Extension | Description |
| .sav | Proprietary binary format, with metadata; sections include header, dictionary, and observations |
| .por | Portable file format that saves data and metadata as ASCII text. |
| .sps | Plain-text file format that records SPSS syntax, to recreate analyses. |
| .spv/.spo | Proprietary data formats containing outputs (e.g. tables, charts, visualizations) generated by analytic functions run in SPSS (.spv = v.16 and later; .spo = v.15 and earlier). |
