Any social sciences researchers/students here?

[alxths]

I've been taking a course on statistics and psychological research where we've been using a statistical program called SPSS(or maybe SSPS, hm) to organize data. The program is for windows, needless to say; and it just occured to me for the first time, that relying on a mac might be a future hurdle for me as I intend to pursue graduate studies in psychology.. Does anyone know if SPSS is standard throughout all universities, if it's available for mac, if not then what is, etc.

Anyone here have similar problems using a mac in your field?

[Neserk]

I've been taking a course on statistics and psychological research where we've been using a statistical program called SPSS(or maybe SSPS, hm) to organize data. The program is for windows, needless to say; and it just occured to me for the first time, that relying on a mac might be a future hurdle for me as I intend to pursue graduate studies in psychology.. Does anyone know if SPSS is standard throughout all universities, if it's available for mac, if not then what is, etc.

Anyone here have similar problems using a mac in your field?

I graduated 12 years ago :eek: with my BA in psychology. We had to do all of our statistics by hand. So I can't really comment. But my guess is that in the future you will need a PC along with your MAC in order to function outside your home. No matter how much better MACs may be the PC's will still dominate simply because of competition.

[yoda13]

I've been taking a course on statistics and psychological research where we've been using a statistical program called SPSS(or maybe SSPS, hm) to organize data. The program is for windows, needless to say; and it just occured to me for the first time, that relying on a mac might be a future hurdle for me as I intend to pursue graduate studies in psychology.. Does anyone know if SPSS is standard throughout all universities, if it's available for mac, if not then what is, etc.

Anyone here have similar problems using a mac in your field?

I ran SPSS using Virtual PC simply because the course came with the program for Windows in my grad. class. However, I was going to buy the Mac version before I found that out, so it is available and according to my prof. was better than the windows version.

The psyc program at my uni uses all macs, so I really don't think that it will be a problem for you.

[alxths]

Really, hm.. I was under the impression that any academic research area would be completely dominated by PCs.. Verrrrrrry interesting, verrry interesting indeed..

[mhar4]

http://www.spss.com/spss_mac/

[russed]

im about to start using it this week for my politics research module, what is spss? is it like excel? it means i will have to use a uni computer and work on win 2000, shock horror

[mkrishnan]

im about to start using it this week for my politics research module, what is spss? is it like excel? it means i will have to use a uni computer and work on win 2000, shock horror

SPSS does statistical tests. I guess erm it is a little like Excel. There is a mac version, as mhar4 linked, although it is somewhat limited as I understand. I don't have a copy of it yet bc I'm kinda waiting either to find it at a good price or buy it at student discount in the fall (I'm between schools).

I think the Mac version has a few slight limitations:
- Its version 11.0 or 11.5 vs. 12.0 -- but I haven't really been able to figure out very many of the things which were added to SPSS since 10.0....
- According to the website it doesn't let you run multiple sessions at once. This could be kinda annoying bc SPSS can only open one dataset in one session at once.

There are other packages for mac -- I'm pretty sure SAS is available, although I don't think very many of the SEM packages like LISREL and so on have mac versions. :(

I *do* know some other people in psych (I'm in clinical psychology FWIW, but I took all my stats courses from sociologists :)) who use macs.

[JesseJames]

No offense but, am I the only one who thinks that psychology is along the same lines as chiropractic medicine?
I can see psychiatric medicine as a hard science but psychology just seems like such a ham-fisted discipline.

[Neserk]

No offense but, am I the only one who thinks that psychology is along the same lines as chiropractic medicine?
I can see psychiatric medicine as a hard science but psychology just seems like such a ham-fisted discipline.

I'm guessing you never actually studied psychology.

[mkrishnan]

No offense but, am I the only one who thinks that psychology is along the same lines as chiropractic medicine?
I can see psychiatric medicine as a hard science but psychology just seems like such a ham-fisted discipline.

I guess I could just assume this is trolling, but... psychology means a lot of different things to different people. So does psychiatry. If you're thinking of Rorshach blots and free association and other Freudian/Jungian kinds of elements, there are actually probably more psychiatrists who practice that than psychologists (Jung and Freud themselves were, of course, medical doctors and not psychologists).

But clinical psychology is also primarily a research discipline at big American schools. So what we study are things like genetic heritability of Alzheimer's dementia, brain state physiology changes in schizophrenia, lifespan developmental changes in the brain, neural pathways and changes responsible for depression, etc. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by your comparison to chiropractic medicine, so I'm not seein' it. :(

And there is also a lot of intermingling of psychiatry and psychology academic departments -- usually a fair number of people in any given psychiatry department at a med school are PhD psychologists.

And FWIW, I studied physics first and then engineering, practiced engineering for five years, and am now in psychology, so I don't know how much science *you* do, but I don't feel any particular need to apologize for the scientific or non-scientific nature of psychology.

And besides which, if psychology was all voodoo science why would we be bothering with statistics software? :D If we wanted to make stuff up as we go, Powerpoint makes much prettier pictures than Amos does.