Statistics with SPSS for Social Scientists
Lecturer: Eugène Horber
Modallity: Online
Preliminary Workshop: 6-8 August 2026
Workshop Contents and Objectives
You should attend this workshop if you have few or no skills with basic statistics and statistical software, especially if you attend another workshop during the Summer School that requires these skills.
The aim of this 3-day workshop is to acquire, deepen or brush-up skills with statistics and SPSS.
Topics covered
- Working with SPSS (windows, menus, command language, output management)
- Preparing data for analysis (data entry, data transformations, scale construction, basic data management)
- Descriptive statistics, data exploration and diagnosis(categorical and continuous variables)
- Analysis of relationships (crosstabulations, tables of means, simple regression), summarising relationships and statistical inference.
Workshop design
Based on a large set of e-learning modules, completed by short presentations and tutoring sessions, adapted to the needs of the participants, you will mostly work on your own, at your own pace.
We (my assistant and myself) will be available to provide guidance, further explanations and help in case of difficulties. The e-learning modules of this workshop will remain available after the Summer School. Several learning profiles (sequence of modules) will be provided, for instance participants with no background at all in statistics and statistical software, participants who need to refresh their statistics and software skills, and participants who have never used SPSS but have some background in statistics.
Prerequisites
None, except motivation to acquire skills with statistics and statistical software.
Eugène Horber
University of Geneva and FORS, Switzerland
Eugène Horber is professor emeritus of methodology at the Department of Political Science and International relations, University of Geneva, as well as an affiliated researcher at FORS. He holds a PhD degree in Political Science and has taught social science methodology (both quantitative and qualitative), applied computer science, and statistics at the University of Geneva.
He was the director of the Swiss Summer School (Social Science Methodology) for over 25 years; main teaching activities in the past include the Essex Summer School, the Carcassonne Summer School, the PRESTA programme (EU programme for South America), Eurostat/TES, ENSAE (Paris) and ENSAI (Rennes).
His research interests and publications are in the area of statistical methodology (data exploration, visual data analysis), survey research and aggregate data analysis, as well as applied computer science (didactic software, hypertext, statistical software) and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. He is the author of a software package for exploratory data analysis.