Goodbye SPSS — JASP is Here!
IBM’s Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) is the most widely used software package by students and researchers for data analysis in social science domain. However, it is not free.
You can do everything you do in SPSS in R or Python (and much more) for free as these are open source computing languages with powerful libraries/packages for data analysis. But you will need to learn to do some coding — which is not a particularly easy task.
A good alternative to SPSS would be the one which is free, point and click, can perform most of (if not all) the analyses available in SPSS. All of these things are present in JASP!
JASP is an open source software program supported by University of Amsterdam. It is completely free and can be download from the link given below.
After download, you can easily install it simply by following the instructions that appear on the installation wizard.
Some of the advantages of JASP (in addition to it being free) are as follows:
- Its interface is much more aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. All the buttons are easy to see unlike SPSS where you have to first choose Analyze then the analysis you need to perform.
2. Its output is very easy to copy and edit. SPSS output is bloated and not easy to edit.
3. A tab is added for every analysis you perform and you can go back to it any time you want (see Figure 3). In SPSS, there are no such separate tabs and after running a few analyses, the output file becomes very messy, making it very hard to find your desired output.
4. To do mediation analysis in SPSS, you will have to first install process macro (which is a complicated process) and then specify the model. In JASP, the same can be done in a few clicks.
5. To perform confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) or structural equation modelling (SEM), you will have to install Amos and then spend hours making a model. A lot of times it will give errors and you will not be able the reason. It is a very frustrating process. In JASP, CFA can be done in a few simple clicks and SEM for a few lines of code!
6. It offers both Frequentist as well as Bayesian analysis. SPSS offers only Frequentist analysis. That is a huge improvement.
However, JASP doesn’t currently offer the ability to calculate new variables and its graphs are not as good. But you can do that in MS Excel.
In conclusion, JASP is a very good alternative to SPPS. Start using it!
You can access the JASP guide prepared by University of Greenwich by following the link given below. You can also search for video tutorials on YouTube.
If you need to get in touch with me, you can drop an email at atif.iqtm@pu.edu.pk
