Statistical analysis [closed]

can any one offer advice please? I am going to need to do some statistical analysis soon. Looking for significant difference. I am a bit of a dunce in this area but I will have help. Can you suggest which software would be most appropriate - in the past I have used SPSS. All suggestions will be welcome - thank you.

Solution 1:

Look into R or JGR. Both are open source alternatives to SPSS

R- http://www.r-project.org/

JGR- http://rforge.net/JGR/ (GUI for R)

Solution 2:

Libre Office - Calc is one of the simpler options. Calc provides a spreadsheet and it is essentially a replacement for Microsoft Excel. It also provides a suite of statistical functions that once again depending on the sophistication you need could provide everything you need to perform an analysis. The list of statistical functions is quite extensive and you can check that out to see if it would contain what you need.

PSPP has the goal of being an SPSS replacement. If all you're looking to do is some simple analysis this will probably be good enough for you. It doesn't completely replicate all of the features of SPSS but it is open source and is free to use. Since you already have SPSS experience this would probably be the best program for you to go with. I prefer R and I think it is much more powerful but it doesn't sound like you're going to be doing anything requiring too much sophistication and R does has a bigger learning curve to go along with it.

R is a great choice but it does have a significant learning curve. If you're not comfortable programming some code yourself it would take a while to get used to. With that said it is very powerful and there are a couple of tools that try to help make the experience easier.

Rkward is a decent tool and that provides a GUI for R and some menu driven options to conduct your analysis (with the plus side of giving you the code used to actually conduct the analysis).

Rstudio is a nice IDE for R that provides some nice features. It won't help you learn R but it will make using R quite a bit nicer.

There are other tools such as Rcmdr, JGR, Emacs+ESS, Eclipse+StatET for making using R either easier by providing a nice editor for writing your scripts or by providing a nice GUI interface.

If you want to go with R then initially you'll probably want to give something like Rkward a try and maybe eventually move to Rstudio. If you think R is a route you might take you can leave a comment and I can definitely add to this section. I use R all the time and it's my preferred tool for an analysis.

To summarize:

• R is very powerful and I can guarantee that it will be able to do what you need to do for a statistical analysis but it has a learning curve though and if you don't feel comfortable programming it probably isn't the tool for you.

• PSPP is an SPSS replacement and since you have prior experience it does seem to be a natural fit for your goals.

• Libre Office - Calc is probably simplest tool here but depending on the sophistication you need it will most likely get the job done and you won't even have to leave a spreadsheet environment.