I am familiar with SPSS, the new versions (21 and above) are user friendly and easy can be learned from youtube videos. The important issue is to know the statistical principles behind using the suitable analyses technique
R have capability to perform almost all analyses, you need or even not need but require to know r programming language to perform analyses. However, if you are inexperienced researcher, SPSS is to easy to use and also have capabilities to perform most statistical analyses. Thus, begin with SPSS in your early career then, after you gain experience to perform analyses, you can use R. R is very hard to learn for non-English, limited statistical knowledge and novice researchers. You can use simple /multiple regression analyses for your subject in my personnel view which can easily perform in SPSS. However, statistical analyses always performed in accordance with your research hypotheses. Without knowing your research hypotheses, we can just give you advice.
I started with using SPSS long time back. Softwares like SPSS and JMP are great in terms of being user-friendly and easy to use but still there is a learning curve once you started doing complex analysis. The power of R lies in the fact that it is a programming language with packages that are equipped to deal with messy data, and can be used for all sorts of statistical methods. If it is a real world data you are dealing with, it is likely that you will be spending a considerable amount of time cleaning it and getting it into a correct format for the analysis. For me, the flexibility to write pipelines combining data cleaning and analysis makes it more preferred. The choice of a statistical method will depend on the data.
Data Analysis is that there is continuum between explanatory models on one side and predictive models on the other side. The decisions you make during the modeling process depend on your goal.
When we’re looking at SPSS and SAS, both of these languages originate from the explanatory side of Data Analysis. They are developed in an academic environment, where hypotheses testing plays a major role. This makes that they have significant less methods and techniques in comparison to R and Python. Nowadays, SAS and SPSS both have data mining tools (SAS Enterprise Miner and SPSS Modeler), however these are different tools and you’ll need extra licenses.
One of the major advantages of open source tooling is that the community continuously improves and increases functionality. R was created by academics, who wanted their algorithms to spread as easily as possible. Ergo R has the widest range of algorithms, which makes R strong on the explanatory side and on the predictive side of Data Analysis.
I think it depends on our abilities with the software. According the your topic, I think exploratory factor analysis should be the method. So SPSS has many facility to do the factor analysis. If you want to go further like party analysis with factor you discovered, you can use another branch of SPSS called AMOS.
In my humble opinion R is better for complete project for example in e-Commerce, market basket analysisusing the CRAN - Package (association rules). In other words rules package is used to find items frequently ordered together can be a special use. Also there is another use on Git for Google Analytics using (rga, ganalytics) package.
It truly depends on your requirements and ability to customize. Both are equally good but then start with your check list requirements and it will answer the need.