In his popular workbook, An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis, Philip H. Pollock III gets students using actual political data and working with a software tool that prepares them for future political science courses.
Now updated using SPSS 16.0, the new third edition is a no-nonsense and friendly introduction to using SPSS: students learn through a series of guided examples, reference 120 screenshots, and can count on step-by-step instructions to all procedures. As in previous editions, the workbook covers the full array of data analysis procedures from introductory to advanced, including descriptive statistics and data transformations, to dummy variables and interaction effects. A final chapter shows students how to code data and how to read it into SPSS.
With 50% more exercises than in the previous edition, students not only interact with a range of substantive political science questions, but encounter more exercises on comparative and international politics, investigating such topics as the relative importance of cultural and institutional factors in shaping political parties or the extent to which wealth is equally distributed within countries.
The third edition also delves deeper into the use of graphic display to complement empirical results. Students learn state of the art editing techniques using SPSS Chart Editor, while following protocols described by leading experts in the graphic display of quantitative information. In addition to creating simple bar charts and line graphs, students will learn to produce scatterplots and logistic regression curves.