The Benefits of Doing Statistics by Hand

If you're a psychology student I can imagine you grumbling at the title of this blog and you're probably thinking of a late-middle aged lecturer moaning about the use of SPSS. But in all honesty I have discovered the benefits of calculating statistics by hand for myself today.

Over the past week or so I have been worried because I can't put SPSS on my Macbook just yet, in panic I started to hypothesise ways that I could do statistics on my Mac, I discovered that the statistical functions on iWork Numbers 09 aren't the same as those on Microsoft Excel, thus the statistical tests that are needed most in psychology are not included (with exception of the t-test and correlation as far as I am aware). Suddenly I came to the conclusion that if I could do all of these tests by hand then I could just use SPSS to check my answers when I am studying for my Masters degree. So, today I got out my statistics textbook and taught myself how to calculate and one-way ANOVA. It was surprisingly much more easy than I thought it would be.

I feel that the hands on method is much more beneficial than using SPSS even if you do understand all of the statistical concepts. I believe that you can only truly understand what you have done if you are able to calculate the test by hand. There are probably quite a few people who would disagree with me, I suppose SPSS is useful in some cases, for example when you have 500 participants to deal with (I would argue that the statistical power would be too high here though) and it's also an asset for psychologists who aren't so statistically minded and perhaps prefer qualitative data. If there were computer programs that did qualitative analysis for you I think I'd jump at it with a shot. 

In my opinion SPSS should only be used for checking and I suppose printing your analysis for projects (like typing up in neat). So next time you are about to carry out a test on SPSS think to yourself "can I actually carry this test out by hand?"

- Jodie