UCL Learning Portfolio

Course schedule: 

1. Thursday 6th June (9:30-13:00)
2. Friday 7th June (9:30-13:00)
3. Monday 10th June (9:30-13:00)
4. Tuesday 11th June (9:30-13:00)

This is a computing add-on course to introduce a commonly used statistical package (SPSS), for postgraduate students who have previously attended the Understanding Statistical Concepts in Research programme on the practical application of statistical methods in research. 

Across four half-day interactive workshops in a UCL computing lab, we will demonstrate how to run the analyses which were introduced in the main course. Students will start from the basics, including how to import and manipulate data, and work up to advanced methods.

Throughout this practical add-on course, students will replicate the analyses being demonstrated in real-time, before working through exercises in the class to practice these methods. Comprehensive notes to accompany each session are made available at the start of the course so that students have these to hand and for future reference.

Tutors will be on hand at all times to answer questions and help with any issues encountered, providing ‘hints and tips’ on things to be aware of when using SPSS. There is also a one-to-one consultancy service for students who attend the course to see one of the tutors for specific advice on their project. 

The sessions will cover:

• Navigating SPSS
• Entering, importing and manipulating data
• Checking, summarising and displaying data
• Simple statistical tests
• Regression analyses considering one factor or multiple factors at the same time
• Model checking

This course is due to be delivered face-to-face and will be held at: 5th Floor Seminar Room, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 4TJ

Please note that you will need to download SPSS from the UCL software database for home use and so you will be required to bring in your own laptops for the course and are instructed to install the software beforehand – the benefit of this is that it is how you will use it when working on your own projects. 

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Record data from your study in SPSS
• Check data and manipulate it in preparation for analyses
• Explore and display data
• Run analyses using simple statistical tests or more complex regression models 
• Interpret results from SPSS output

Postgraduate research students at any stage of their projects, who have previously attended the Understanding Statistical Concepts in Research course.