Earlier versions of SPSS contained a simple PLOT procedure that also produced regression statistics. SPSS 10 has dropped that simple procedure, but one can get a plot with regression statistics. As described by Ms. Wuyi Wang at SPSS, Inc., this is the procedure, with illustrations from me:

• Go to Graphs->Interactive->Scatterplot

• drag and drop the variables to the vertical axis and horizontal axis.

• It should look like this:

• Right-click on each variable to make sure that Scale is selected
  • [SPSS interprets data without decimals as "Ordinal"]
  • (if the variable is tagged as Ordinal no regression line will be shown).
• Click on the Fit tab. Select Regression from the drop-down list (the default is None).

• Leave all other settings as default.

Click OK. A scatterplot made this way has the regression line and R-squared.

 

For maximum utility in analysis, correlation and regression assumes that both variables have unimodal, symmetrical distributions -- at least that one or the other variable is not highly skewed in either direction

 

In a technical sense -- and using a term to be defined explicitly later -- both variables are assumed to approximate a normal distribution, which looks like this:

 

Problems arise if either variable departs from a normal distribution

If one variable is skewed away from a normal distribution, and the other is not, the correlation can never equal 1.

If both variables are skewed away from normal, the relationship is likely to be artificially high.

Use the COMPUTE command in SPSS to transform the variable by pulling in the outliers

See the transformation of a variable on "CIVIL DISORDER" computed for nations across the world