SPSS is a statistical software package largely used in the social sciences. If applied to analyze large scale secondary data, it provides students and researchers with a powerful tool to answer critical questions on phenomena, trends, and relationships in a variety of disciplinary areas. Most textbooks and courses at the undergraduate and graduate level tend to combines the teaching of substantive topics in methodology and methods with practical applications of this software package. This course tries to contribute twofold. Practically, it aims at offering students and faculty and opportunity to learn about the software package, its tools, its challenges independently from content coverage on methods and statistics. While maintaining a substantial coverage of analytical and statistical topics, the course will focus on how to design and implement data analysis with SPSS syntax commands rather than on teaching statistics.

Pedagogically, this course will:

• Familiarize students and new researchers to public use large scale datasets
• teach how to approach and trat large scale secondary data and prepare them for data analysis
• apply a variety of descriptive and inferential statistical methods to answer research questions
• and then show how to present and discuss the results of the statistical analyses in academic and non-academic contexts.