Welcome to PASSS, a site funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and dedicated to the practical applications of statistics in the social sciences.
The purpose of this website is to make quantitative research methods more accessible to researchers and students through detailed instruction on the use of statistical analyses in real datasets. Our objective is for you to become more familiar and more comfortable with both the quantitative methods themselves and SPSS, a statistical software package designed for use in the social sciences. In order help you get the most from this site, we've made online tutorial pages, printable PDF documents, and video tutorials available throughout.
This is not your average quantitative tutorial. As you work through the sections of this site, you will be learning quantitative methods by doing. Because we are using real, full datasets, the way we approach the analyses and the results we obtain in these analyses will be similar to what you might find in your independent studies. The experience you gain here will help you use statistical methods more confidently as you conduct your own research.
On the menu on the left hand side of this page, you'll see that in addition to information on the use of SPSS and instructions on how to access the data used throughout this site, there are also four distinct research questions outlined for you. Clicking on any of these four questions will take you to sections of quantitative analysis tailored to each specific research question. For example, the pages in the Research Question 1 section, which concerns levels of police confidence, will take you through the analyses required to tease out influences on confidence in the police.
If you're new to quantitative methods, SPSS, or to this site, we suggest you begin with the brief SPSS and data access instructional pages at the top of the left hand menu. These will provide you with background that will be enormously helpful in understanding and enjoying the statistical analyses that follow.
In addition, the information provided here is meant to help you determine what statistical analyses might suit your needs and how to use SPSS to run them. To get the most out of this site, we'd recommend you download the datasets outlined in the Data Access page and work through the tutorials posted here in SPSS.
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