Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Testify

I use STATA for my quantitative research needs, but have always taught SPSS in my statistics course for our M.S. in International Affairs. I chose SPSS because it's easy to use and because it was the second most popular statistical package (after SAS) listed in job announcements on monster.com. Today, I received this email from a former international student who has a good job with a large MNC whose headquarters is in Atlanta:

Dr. Dion,

I just wanted to say hello, and I wanted to let you know that I AM using SPSS. :-] One part of my job is to analyze marketing communication effectiveness. We work with few outside companies who collect and provide data for us (they are using SPSS for all their analysis). So, during our first meeting they were VERY surprised and impressed that I know what SPSS is and that I understood their whole presentation.
So, thank you for teaching us how to use that program… the hard work really paid back!

posted by Michelle @ 6:22 PM,

1 Comments:

At 2/07/2007 8:33 PM,  Anonymous said...

Interesting. At IR/PS, we recently started teaching the students (in a professional masters program) Stata. A few years before the switch (from SPSS, I think, though it might have been SAS--obviously, I don't teach these classes) the common argument was that while Stata was coming to dominate social science academics, the other was still more common in business and government. Apparently that has changed, or at least my colleagues who teach the quant methods sequence believe it is changing.

 

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