Okay, so we are in the middle of an exam in Method and Dataanalyzis and are currently conducing a factor analyzis and constructing a regression model. To aid us in this task we use an application called SPSS, formerly known as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

SPSS (originally, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was released in its first version in the 1960s, and is among the most widely used programs for statistical analysis in social science. It is also used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, and others. Data management (case selection, file reshaping, creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored with the data) are features of the base software.

The program comes in modules. It is always necessary to have the SPSS Base System. For more advanced analysis it is necessary to have additional modules. The available modules are:

*SPSS Programmability Extension (added in version 14)
*SPSS Data Validation (added in version 14)
*SPSS Regression Models (linear regression is available in the base system, the regression models module is necessary to use logistic regression, ordinal regression, multinomial logistic regression, and mixed models (multilevel models.)
*SPSS Advanced Models - contains advanced ANOVA techniques, such as multivariate GLM and repeated measures ANOVA.
*SPSS Classification Trees
*SPSS Tables
*SPSS Exact Tests
*SPSS Categories
*SPSS Trendsâ„¢
*SPSS Conjoint
*SPSS Missing Value Analysi
*SPSS Map
*SPSS Complex Samples (added in Version 12).

As this application doesn't have a linux version of the client (although it does have a unix / linux version of the server part) I also looked into the R-project a little bit. SPSS is based on the language S used for statistical work. www.r-project.org . R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.

Although I used the R-project a little I figured I actually wanted a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to aid me in my statistical work, so back to SPSS it was. The application is the most used statistical application in the world, and although quite pricey, the company (also named SPSS) understand the importance of students learning the application and has an affordable student-version. the more students that learn the software, the more likely that it will be used in business.