Where do you want to go with your question? Are you looking for the best program for yourself?

I use both programs and it depends on the context and analyses I want to conduct.

We currently use SPSS at our Foundation but we are curious about R and how widely it is used in psychology. Also, we might be hiring in the future and I wanted to get a sense of what programs others are using. Otherwise, we are happy with SPSS (except for the cost!)

I use SPSS but R would be great for rudimentary statistics (i.e., a course in univariate statistics).  Still, I have encountered "bugs" when R is updated which is very frustrating. I have encountered this when using exploratory factor analysis (principal factors analysis using a promax rotation) especially the Schmid-Leiman procedure. For that reason I do not trust results derived from those procedures  On the other hand, R can be a powerful statistical tool when it is necessary to tweak the procedure and input different start values for factor extraction.  The best benefit is that it is free and students can have it with them the rest of their lives.  But, consider the downside noted above and whether it applies to the procedure your wish to undertake.

Revisiting this question with an addition---do many of you other social science researchers/PhDs use Matlab? Again I have been using SPSS for over ten years but the cost is becoming a question for our research foundation. So, any Matlab users?

I also used Matlab during my time in neuroscience/EEG research. It is very useful in handling large data structures, but I had the impression it was inferior to SPSS and R when it came to statistical analyses. No question, there are a lot of toolboxes for Matlab, but they were not that useful for social sciences/psychology. Besides that, Matlab does cost money to. If you need to safe money, you want to use all standard and the latest statistical procedures for social sciences/psychology, R seems to be the overall best choice in my opinion. The effort to learn the Matlab language is very comparable with R. So, this cant be an argument.

Rainer, thanks for your response. It sounds like it might be best for us to stick with SPSS.

If you have the money, SPSS is a very reasonable choice. I work in the statistics department and I use SPSS and the SPSS R plugin for most of the standard analyses, for the more "extraordinary" things, like robust estimation techniques, I use R. Therefore, I recommend to use both tools, depending on your analyses. Are you satisfied with SPSS, does it have everything you need?

We are currently switching from SPSS to R because we introduced computational methods (like supervised machine learning or sentiment analysis) which are impossible to perform in SPSS . Also, we started retrieving social media data via the APIs. I am thus switching from SPSS to R.

Hey Ro, how are you doing? You may believe it or not, but Thomas also teaches R in his Multivariate Statistics lecture now! We wont switch entirely to R, but it is very useful to have both programs available.

Greetings from OS!

Rainer

Hey Rainer, doing fine! Interesting to know that OS partially converted, too. We did this for consistency - it does not make sense to teach SPSS in the bachelor program and then teach R in the master program. Our institute needs it here: https://www.tu-ilmenau.de/en/computational-communication-science/, while I need it here: https://osf.io/hqsxe/ (the script was developed by Julian).

Just saw this question, Linda. For what it's worth, my Dept of Psychology at Illinois Tech is in the process of switching undergrad and grad level into stats courses from SPSS to R.