Hi Roland and folks:

Roland's and Susanna's comments were very interesting. I think we need to keep in mind that unlike SPSS, R is more than a statistical package. It's a tool. SPSS does indeed make life easy, particularly for data preprocessing (or data "cleaning"), something that is perhaps not advisable using R (the current versions). Also, I think it's a myth that R has a steep learning curve. Actually, the learning curve of R is much flatter compared to SPSS or SAS, may be because R is extremely flexible. 


My personal experience, (for whatever it's worth), from no concept of R, I learned it in about 6 hours using John Maindonald's tutorial+R-archives with two windows opened, one for documentation and one for the IDE, and I had a dataset ready. In comparison, to reach the same level of user comfort, it took me as a graduate student at least three  semesters work at a US university to learn SPSS. SPSS looks deceptively easy in its point-and-click environment. 


That said, I think co-teaching R and point-and-click SPSS to statistics newbies-intermediates who are also budding social scientists can make the lives of these social science majors a lot harder than they already are. As a result, you'll lose a lot of people who could have converted to R, but now will perceive R as a difficult to learn language. Either stick with SPSS, or use SPSS for data preprocessing, and once they are up and comfortable with basic functionalities of R, switch them to R. But not both at the same time or in quick succession.

If I were to teach a course where SPSS and R would coexist, I'd introduce R slowly. I'd start with SPSS, show them how to use SPSS for routine data management tasks and OLAP etc..., and teach the basics using SPSS, and encourage the students to write syntaxes in SPSS instead of point and click. When they would be comfortable writing SPSS syntaxes, I'd introduce R to show how easily and elegantly they could achieve the same goal-oriented tasks in an R environment. However, they could still use some powerful features of SPSS in terms of OLAP cube processing, and data preprocessing and interface R with SPSS.

My two cents,

Arin




>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:30 +0200
> From: "Rau, Roland" <Rau@demogr.mpg.de>

> >
> 	Yes, I do know the R-Commander. But I did not want to give them a
>GUI but rather expose them to the command line after I demonstrated that the
>steep learning curve in the beginning is worth the effort for the final
>results.
>
> 	That is why I wanted to ask the list if anyone has faced the same
>situation to persuade students to use R. Are social science students most
>impressionable with some nice graphs (e.g. filled.contour) or will they get
>a more positive attitude if I used the "R as an overgrown calculator" like
>in Peter Dalgaards book? Or should I write an SPSS script to perform a
>certain task and demonstrate how easy, compact, and elegant it is to fulfill
>the same job in R? Just telling them "We will use R during our course"
>without any explanation would be not a good choice in my opinion.
>
> 	As I have written before: I would like the students to trust me that
>it is worth to invest some extra energy in the beginning. I do not expect to
>receive any prepared demonstration from anyone of you. I am more curious
>about your teaching experiences and how you got people enthusiastic to use
>this software.
>
> 	Thanks,
> 	Roland


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