Quick Descriptives in IBM SPSS Statistics

In IBM SPSS Statistics, you can work inside a single, integrated interface to run descriptive statistics, regression, advanced statistics and machine learning models. You can create publication-ready charts, tables, and decision trees in one tool. IBM SPSS Statistics is easy to use, provides analysis automation, comprehensive statistical tools, integration with open source, and help at your fingertips.  

To improve your experience using IBM SPSS Statistics, the Version 1 SPSS experts have created various Tech Tips. This Tech Tip looks at how to run quick descriptives in IBM SPSS Statistics.  

To obtain Descriptives go to the Analyze menu, select Descriptive Statistics, and select Descriptives. Once the Descriptives dialogue box is open, choose the variables to include the analysis by dragging variables to the Variable(s) box or clicking on the variable and using the arrow to move it across. Click on the Options button to select statistics. Clicking on the Options button provides further statistics, such as measures of Dispersion and Distribution. The measures of Dispersion are Standard Deviation, Variance, Minimum, Maximum, Range, and S. E. mean. The measures of distribution are Kurtosis and Skewness. You can also choose display order by Variable list, Alphabetic order, Ascending means, or Descending means. Click Continue to return to the main dialogue box. Once you select options, click Continue to return to the main dialogue. Click OK to run your descriptives.  

The Descriptives procedure will produce a table with the number of cases in the data set for each variable and any statistics requested. Placing multiple variables in the list also shows the number of valid cases for each variable and Valid N listwise. You can also use the descriptives procedure to save standardized values as variables. Selecting this option will save z scores as new variables in the data.