SPSS primarily uses GUI interfaces, although you can learn to use
coding if you want.  Typically, less sophisticated students learn very
little about coding.

I cannot provide you much advice about Stata, I have used it rarely.

R has some supplemental GUI's that can be invoked.  Typically, however,
it is coding oriented.  The coding is sophisticated and somewhat hard to
learn (harder, in my estimation, than the coding for SAS).  The
operators and coding language are not especially intuitive.

You can generally accomplish the same thing with SPSS, STATA, or R (or
SAS).  R has the advantage that it is free.  SPSS has a somewhat more
limited range of procedures.  SAS separates its procedures into packages
(as does SPSS) and to get the full range you (or your institution) have
to pay an enormous licensing fee.  R also uses packages (which are
tiny), but they do not have a fee.  I cannot address the full range of
STATA procedures.

My experience with R is that it has not solved the problem of smoothly
updating from one iteration to the next, so that when the R development
group updates the iteration, which happens several times a year, you do
not retain your settings when you update with them.   This might be a
windows characteristic, the problem may not exist with the Linux version
(R is native to Linux).  If it were not for the lack of an adequate GUI,
R would be the most flexible of the options.  Because of the lack of a
suitable GUI, it is not suitable for moderate to low skilled students.
Even high skilled students need to devote considerable effort to
learning R in particular, rather than, as with SPSS, as an element of
learning statistics.

These are my perceptions.  I expect others will offer alternate views.

Dan Williams




Michael Plenty wrote:
> My name is Mike and I work as an intern for a major consulting firm in
> Washington,DC.
>
> My company uses SPSS, as most undergraduate programs and companies,
> however,
> now that I'm beginning the thinking process for graduate school, most
> schools, in particular Northwestern, UChicago, and Yale, all recommend I
> become familiar with Stata and R.
>
> Are there any major differences between the three programs?
>
> If so, what? and what resources are out there to help me adjust?
>
> Michael Plenty
>
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