Good SPSS skills for Marketing Research?

February 28, 2008 11:30 AM

What do I need to know how to do in SPSS (or SAS) to do market/marketing research analysis?

I've been applying for associate level jobs in the field of marketing research, and many places seem to prefer candidates with experience with certain software. Powerpoint is one, Access is another, but mainly SPSS and SAS. I've used SPSS in college in psych courses before, but I'm rusty.

I'm looking for advice on what types of things I should learn (or re-learn) how to do in SPSS (and also SAS and other stat programs) that would help me in marketing research.

Also of interest would be recommendations for books or other materials that would be useful and free/open-source alternatives to SPSS to practice on.

posted by shotgunbooty to work & money (4 comments total)

It depends. Will you be doing regression analyses? If so, you need to know how to do basic descriptive statistics, how to do basic bivariate statistical tests, how to look at your data graphically, how to do regression diagnostics and check regression assumptions, etc. All this can be done point-and-click in SPSS.

Will you be managing data? Then you will probably have to learn some SPSS syntax. And if this is the case, you will probably want to do SAS anyway. Knowing how SAS "thinks" is key, in terms of how it handles datasets, how it uses procedures (procs), how it does graphics, etc.

You can dload a 2-week trial version of SPSS from their website.
posted by tiburon at 12:05 PM on February 28

Regression analysis, diagnostics, etc. Include the generalized linear models, which are frequently trickier to think about.

Survey (sampling) statistics. There are dark incantations to know about pre- and post-stratification, sampling units, etc.

Bootstrap/jack knife analysis.

How to make pretty pretty graphs.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 1:34 PM on February 28

OLAP cubes. Data mining.
posted by jasper411 at 4:12 PM on February 28

SPSS syntax is your friend. It's not as hard as it looks. It will make your life a lot easier.

To do the job properly, you need to understand how the statistical tests you will be using work. One book I found pretty easy to understand is Howell's (look on amazon). It is extremely light on SPSS itself, but it will give you enough of a background on the basic (univariate) statistical techniques. When it comes to Multivariate statistics, Tabachnick and Fidell are the go (a new edition was released last year so you should be able to get some as new copies for cheap).

If you have some basic understanding of statistics and research methods, the internet is the other place to look. It's full of great info, just search for the stats technique you need.
posted by doctor.dan at 2:54 AM on March 1