I think it depends on your preferences on inputting commands because it is very common for you to input commands in STATA, while SPSS provides a user-friendly interface to you to direct click the bottoms in order to conduct statistical analysis.
Statistician may prefer R, SAS and STATA, whereas researchers without sound statistical background may prefer SPSS. Hope my answer helps you. Thanks.
In my experience, Martin's response above is quite accurate. However, I would add that I think it is extremely important that the users of any statistics package have a good knowledge about why they are doing what they are doing. Personally, I really like SPSS, but I am also aware that it is easy to "press its buttons" and end up with output that is not sufficiently valid and, at times, quite silly.
Both are good. Yet, it depends upon the analysis of your choice. eg, I feel good with STATA for a lamda value in two way heckman whereas SPSS is good while data censor is prompted as in Tobit. Regards
I have used both SPSS and STATA and I must admit both are unique tools. As a trainer, I usually start people with SPSS because the inter-phase is much more friendly to beginners and later advance them to STATA. As previously mention by Martin and others, your choice will be dependent on your background and interest. These days, I use STATA more often than SPSS.
Not only STATA and SPSS, there are other tools available for quantitative analysis like E-views, Systat, R etc., even in Excel also you can do the analysis. As for as your question is concerned, it is better to use a software that you already have some hands on experience. Both are equally good. SPSS is widely used compare to STATA, both the software’s are user friendly but in my view STATA is a little edge over SPSS.
SPSS is more user friendly. But to enter the qualitative date in to a statistical package you need to prepare a likert scale to convert this qualitative data in to quantitative format. then only you can use SPSS. But in my knowledge Qualitative data is not for statistical analysis. Qualitative data is support to validate the quantitative results.
Comparing these two (SPSS and STATA), which one is good is a relative matter. Infact, rather than technical issue, the appropriateness depends on the situation - mostly on individual. From my side, the vote will go to SPSS as this software is much more user-friendly.
It depends totally on your type of analysis. SPSS is user friendly no doubt on that. However, after the inclusion of many features STATA is also becoming very user friendly and effective. Specially in case of Time Series Analysis and Panel Data Analysis Stata is very useful. For cross section analysis though SPSS is very common but the use of STATA is demanding.
As a trained statistician I believe STATA is for more precise results especially for any significant influence of x over y particularly at less than 10% probability. Of course SPSS is quite user friendly.
It depends on what you want to used it for? Both are good, but I preferred SPSS. However, better and advanced software that can do many things that these two software cannot do, such SEM PLS, and AMOS. These two are also wonderful, I think you can try them out too as well. Good luck!
For me, Stata is way superior over SPSS in that it has a multitude of inbuilt statistical techniques (than SPSS) which can be applied depending on the nature of the data. It can be used for complex statistical analysis.
I agree with Sileshi Abebe. STATA is superior to SPSS in that precision in the result is more while the data analyzed using STATA in situations like bring out the LEMDA or the CENSORED value as in ToBIT
So far as the precision in the result is concerned, my assessment is that the precision in findings/results provided by STATA is usually little bit more than that provided by SPSS in quantitative analysis.
Accordingly, STATA can be considered to be little bit superior to SPSS in respect of precision in the result.
Thus, my view is almost similar to that of Sileshi Abebe and Devarajan Sundaraarajan.
However, I feel that SPSS is more friendly to the users. Thus my feelings is similar to that of Haji Saediman.