Guidelines for Quantitative Data Analysis in SPSS and Jamovi

Choosing among SPSS, Jamovi, and R

SPSS

SPSS is a feature-rich statistical analysis software that is popular among academics all over the world. It is a proprietary software and you need a license to run it. I use SPSS mainly in my teaching, but seldom in my own research work because of the licensing issue and because it is a bit outdated in its design philosophy in my opinion. The fact that it only runs on Windows and macOS is also inconvenient to me, as my daily workflow is mainly on Linux.

SPSS is installed in the computer labs at many institutions. If you are using it from home, you can see if your institution has purchased the license for you for that purpose. Alternatively, you may try SPSS free for 30 days (https://www.ibm.com/hk-en/analytics/spss-trials). (But notice: You can only use the trial once and when the trial expires you will not be able start another trial on the same computer.)

Jamovi

Jamovi is a more modern, open-source statistical analysis software that works very much like SPSS, which makes it a promising replacement of the latter. In many cases I find Jamovi easier to use and more convenient, although it is not as feature-rich as SPSS in particular when it comes to graphing. I use Jamovi in most of my research work, particularly when I need to run some quick analyses. Sometimes I also use it to read SPSS data files. I recommend Jamovi over SPSS if it could serve your purpose.

Jamovi is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. It can be downloaded from the Jamovi website (https://www.jamovi.org/). Installation is easy. You may also take a look at the cloud version at https://cloud.jamovi.org for a preview.

R

Jamovi is built on top of the R statistical language, another open-source statistical analysis software that is becoming more and more popular these days among statisticians and data scientists. R is extremely powerful, but it also has a steeper learning curve. I use R for the more complicated types of data analyses such as structural equation modelling, or when I need to do some sophisticated visualization. Since R is a programming language itself, it is also perfect when I need to repeat an analysis multiple times on different data files and with different parameters.

To use R you need to install the R interpreter from its project page (https://cran.r-project.org). Most people would also install a GUI environment for easier use, and one popular choice of this is R Studio (https://rstudio.com/). Jamovi can also be used as a simple R editor by installing the Rj module.

R is currently not featured in this website. If you need help in R, I recommend the Quick-R website (https://www.statmethods.net).