[R] R vs SPSS

[Ronán Conroy]

Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

> What worries me about SPSS is that it often results in poor statistical
> practice.  The defaults in dialog boxes are not very good in some cases,
> and like SAS, SPSS tends to lead users to make to many assumptions
> (linearity in regression being one of the key ones).
> -- 
> Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
>                       Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University
>
> ______________________________________________
>
My worry about SPSS is that it encourages people to do analysis and 
dataset manipulation 'on-the-fly', without leaving behind an audit trail 
that can be used to reconstruct the dataset and results. Certainly, SPSS 
has a 'paste' button which allows you to save a 'syntax' file of 
commands, but most users appear to ignore it. And post-hoc editing of 
graphs and tables cannot be saved thus (unless I'm missing out something 
here).

-- 

Ronan M Conroy (rconroy at rcsi.ie) 
Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics 
Royal College of Surgeons 
Dublin 2, Ireland 
+353 1 402 2431 (fax 2764) 
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