A plentiful amount of toolboxes are also available to help answer your research questions (such as EEGLab for analysing EEG data). As with R, the learning path is steep, and you will be required to create your own code at some point. MatLab is an analytical platform and programming language that is widely used by engineers and scientists. It does however come with an active community engaged in building and improving R and the associated plugins, which ensures that help is never too far away. While R is a very powerful software, it also has a steep learning curve, requiring a certain degree of coding. Toolboxes (essentially plugins) are available for a great range of applications, which can simplify various aspects of data processing. R is a free statistical software package that is widely used across both human behavior research and in other fields. R (R Foundation for Statistical Computing) It also includes the option to create scripts to automate analysis, or to carry out more advanced statistical processing. SPSS offers the ability to easily compile descriptive statistics, parametric and non-parametric analyses, as well as graphical depictions of results through the graphical user interface (GUI). SPSS, (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is perhaps the most widely used statistics software package within human behavior research. While you’ll need to understand what to do with the data, and how to interpret the results, software that is designed for statistical analysis can make this process as smooth and as easy as possible.Ī great number of tools are available to carry out statistical analysis of data, and below we list (in no particular order) the seven best packages suitable for human behavior research. How the data is treated is just as important, and analyzing good data in the right way can lead to groundbreaking findings and insights.ĭata analysis is often seen as the most scary aspect of completing research, but it doesn’t have to be that way. While the first part of any experiment – the planning and execution – is critically important, it is only half the battle. Hopefully, if our experiments are planned and executed correctly, we can get hold of good data that can tell us something unique about the world. We carry out research to test hypotheses, and we do that by getting hold of data.

Tools for data analysis