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Art Kendall...contd. |
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Art Kendall in his home ofice
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Art Kendall (contd.): Nowadays, I recommend to clients who want to use other packages that they first do their preparation in SPSS and just save it as whatever. The people who started SPSS were people who actually used data from people. Most of the kinds of data I’ve dealt with are people-based data and people are much less cooperative than bean plants. King Douglas: Bean plants? Art Kendall: The statistics of agronomy for a long time didn’t deal differentially with different kinds of missing data. But with people data, that’s always a major consideration. King Douglas: How did you learn SPSS? Art Kendall: I picked up the book and the online help in the DEC environment—a certain amount of the help was already online…not the fully interactive help. King Douglas: About how long have been using SPSS? Art Kendall: Since 1972, but not exclusively. King Douglas: Do you think SPSS has improved Art Kendall: Yes. It still could have some improvements. I’ve been at them about cognitive perceptual factors like developing a font so you could tell what those operator symbols are. They should doing things like prettying it up like you could in 1970 in FORTRAN, where you could make sure there were spaces on either side of an equals side, etc., just things that made it much more readable. King Douglas: Do you consider yourself a specialist in any area of SPSS programming? Art Kendall: Factor and cluster analytic techniques, quality assurance in data handling and data modification. |
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