New York 1880
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    • Lab 1: Exploring 1880 Census Data
    • Lab 2: Asking Questions of the IPUMS data
    • Lab 3: Visualizing the Social Geography of Irish New York
    • Lab 4: Creating History on the Web

Tutorials > SPSS

SPSS is a fairly straightforward software package that performs a whole range of calculations and analysis of data. It is particularly suitable in our case, because we will be working with tables downloaded from the Minnesota Population Center that contain several hundreds of thousands of records. 


We'll largely use SPSS to access the census data, derive summary counts, averages, and charts.

1. The basics of SPSS

2. Downloading a census extract from IPUMS using SPSS

3. Making simple frequency counts and performing crosstabs

4. Selecting (filtering) cases

5. Building charts

6. Additional Online Tutorials:
  • Basics of SPSS interface, including entering, editing, and transforming data.
  • Importing data files from Excel.
  • Value labels, frequency counts, and descriptive statistics