I figured what was going on with the inaccurate scatter plot from the Chart Builder. For some reason, the variables were being treated as Nominal, despite the variable view showing them as Scale!
This may be an artifact of an import from SAS, but the Legacy Dialogs and Descriptives treat both variables as if they are Scale. Even though, I was able to get a correct graph by changing the variables to Nominal and back to Scale, I am left just as befuddled how this even happened in the first place. It seems that you may be better off using Excel (or Numbers!) for graphing.
This error really calls into question most analyses I (and others) run in SPSS. Considering that much of the published research in psychology relies on the accuracy of SPSS in reporting statistics, I am very concerned.
Moral of the story: Use SAS or R. Unfortunately, I can’t use SAS (it hasn’t had a Mac version since OS 9). Maybe it is high time to give R a serious look, but the lack of GUI makes for a huge learning curve.
3 Comments
I hear you’ll soon be able to get a stripped down version of SPSS Base, essentially just the GUI, and be able to run it with R. It’ll be called “Statisitcs for R” or something, so you should be to get the power of R with the familiarity of SPSS. Look out for it in the next couple of months
That seems more prepostorous than microsoft making office mac only!
Greetings, Zach:
Have you checked out the SAS product JMP? You can download a 30 day trial of JMP 7 for Mac and in April JMP 8 will be available for the beautiful Mac (heavenly choir sings).
http://tinyurl.com/b4k6p2
It has the easy to use GUI, I think you may like it. Any questions, let me know.
TK George