[earl]

Just use R -- the stats support is IMO the best in the world and it has very high adoption amongst stats grad departments and practitioners of statistics. The visualization tools work well -- I've written about basic plotting tools, but if you're just starting in R, skip the built in plotting tools and just use ggplot2. It allows you to build astounding graphics.

Of course, any of this is a time investment, but I'd say the only alternative is Matlab - S-plus is stupidly expensive and no better than R, Stata is a pain for any sort of automated processing, SAS is overpriced by an order of magnitude with a hideous learning curve for functionality that lags 10 years behind R, and Mathematica is brand new to the market. Let someone else work out the kinks.

[steve19]

Is SPSS any good?

I have used R for projects, but quite a few researchers I know use SPSS.

[stevenbedrick]

SPSS is quite good, for certain things. A lot of researchers use it because little-to-no programming is required, and you can interact with it in an entirely GUI-way- if you can use Excel, you can use SPSS. It makes it easy to set up certain analyses, and gives lots of output... and there's where my concerns about it come up. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security with it, and to end up with statistics that you don't know how to interpret properly (I call this the "Huh. Now what do I do?" problem). The documentation is often pretty useless on this front as well- lots of pages follow this general pattern: "Jones Test of Gronkularity: If checked, SPSS will calculate the Jones Test of Gronkularity statistic, which tests the null hypothesis that the data are gronkular", as opposed to useful information about why you might care whether the data are gronkular or not, why the Jones test was included in another test's output, etc. For a product aimed at people with relatively limited technical capabilities, I feel like SPSS should have better docs.

One important thing to know about SPSS- that a lot of people don't- is that is really a programming language, for which the GUI is simply a code generator. I find that it's almost always easier for me to interact directly with the under-the-hood guts of SPSS than the GUI, although sometimes when setting up a new analysis for the first time I'll use the GUI to do most of the work and then tweak its results.

[steve19]

Thanks.