On 24/10/2014 11:28, John Darrington wrote:
... SPSS does not permit you to examine their code, so nobody can know whether of not there are inaccuracies in it. I would be suspicious of any research publication which quotes statistical results produced by software which cannot be audited.
Which errors did you find ?
I work with both, SPSS and PSPP on different PCs. I have worked with SPSS since 1977, then on punch cards. Never any of my reports or publications were rejected because of errors in SPSS procedures.
An industrial product such as SPSS that is used by research, industry, and administration since several decades and in particular by numerous researchers in social science and survey _methods _, such as the National survey data archives, like ROPER, ICPSR, NDA, GESIS, ZUMA, a program packet which is one of the standard research tools in survey research, is fraught with error ? And all those specialists , for decades, do not see errors in their calculation in SPSS ???
How to say - don't exaggerate.
Like you say, the GNU Project does not offer a guarantee for PSPP. Similarly there is no guarantee for SPSS (except for the the media it comes on). However, unlike SPSS, with PSPP you can make a contract with a software consultancy who will gaurantee to fix problems should they arise. With SPSS this would be impossible.
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