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Comment by musingsole | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the use case for SPSS. My local university is training their neuroscience researchers on it, which seems so odd in 2022 with Julia or python sitting right there.

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Have been using SPSS decades and I think it is a good statistical tool for those who do not want to do programming much. It gives me something Iu can easily explain to and teacher other statistical users (e.g. hand in many papers with some regression analysis in it and team members who have no programming experience and do NOT want to learn much other than absolutely minimum and necessary; they are social scientists and that is it). I knew R, python, SPSS, SIR/DBMS and most of SAS all can do this. Frankly only SPSS they can use. And I believe they can use it after I am not in the picture anymore still. That is the use case of SPSS. There are more people in that hole than your think.

It's 80% about having a point and click interface, 10% about path dependency effects, and 10% about whether or not they have a paid license.

Teaching someone who knows a bit of Excel and very little programming how to do statistical analysis in SPSS is easy and lets you focus on the statistics.

Teaching them to do statistical analysis in Julia will involve you spending 80% of your time teaching them Julia and maybe 20% of your time teaching them statistical analysis.

> Teaching them to do statistical analysis in Julia will involve you spending 80% of your time teaching them Julia and maybe 20% of your time teaching them statistical analysis.

This works until they run into a use case that doesn't involve running various forms of regression analysis on panel data.

In the parent comment's case, I could imagine that there's an expectation that someone doing neuroscience research will eventually have to expand beyond what's possible in SPSS. In this case, it may make sense to go through the effort of teaching them how to program in Python or Julia.

I agree with you, though I wonder what's included in your definition of "do statistical analysis" ? Is it just using the stats functions as blackboxes without understanding what is going on under the hood?

I find using Python and/or R to be very helpful for teaching, since you can implement the stats procedures using primitives (prob. calculations), so you get some experience with how things work.

Sure it requires some "coding" but nothing harder than using a calculator, so I think it's worth learning.

Julia is a bit more involved (need to learn something about data types), but still would be manageable.

SPSS was originally created for social scientists and psychologists. It allows people who usually don't have really a clue what they are doing, to create something that looks like science. Later on it was marketed as a predictive analytics suite for business minded people.

From time to time, I still have to use SPSS. Again and again I'm flabberghasted how bad this overpriced piece of software is.

Ease of use. I haven't used it personally, but I'm pretty sure you can do everything with a mouse - no need to learn actual code.

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