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thomblake comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion

20 Post author: Yvain 19 October 2012 01:12AM

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Comment author: thomblake 19 October 2012 03:17:42PM 4 points [-]

Actually, what I'd recommend doing for real, is moving the data to a better spreadsheet program like Open Office, doing the split programmatically there (as suggested elsewhere), and then importing the data into SPSS.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 October 2012 07:05:40PM 0 points [-]

SPSS is a software build for doing statistics. There should be a way in SPSS to do this that's better than switching to a different software.

Comment author: thomblake 19 October 2012 07:22:21PM 5 points [-]

It's software built for doing statistics a long time ago. And it makes certain assumptions about the sorts of data you're going to be giving it. This is a solution for dealing with Google's silly nonstandard way of representing multi-punch lists, not a solution to a statistical problem. It's totally reasonable to process the raw data using some other program or script before sending it to SPSS - it's what the pros do anyway.

Comment author: Kawoomba 19 October 2012 07:18:16PM 3 points [-]

R is a free - and imo better - alternative.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 October 2012 07:26:45PM 1 point [-]

I'm personally using R myself. That's why I can't imagine it to be hard is SPSS because. If Yvain has however spent time learning SPSS it might be costly to relearn things in R.