Introduction

Welcome to this introduction to JASP for complete beginners. This guide was initially designed for University of Sheffield first year Psychology undergraduate students, however it can be easily used by anyone looking to learn the basics JASP, whether you are an educator or a student. In addition, this book is written specifically for people with absolutely no experience in using statistics packages.  It covers the basics of getting started with using JASP and how to conduct the foundational analyses for more advanced statistics; t-tests, correlations, and chi-square. There are no data sets included in this guide, and instructions on how to interpret outputs from the tests are not included. This is because that part of the teaching takes place in our Lectures and Workshops on our module, with this guide as ‘how to’ instructions. Having said this, if you would like to try out this guide with data sets a number are provided by JASP, with and without the analysis completed. This guide was written using JASP version 0.18.3, with updates it is possible that there might be some slight changes in the interface.

 ‘Why JASP? What is wrong with SPSS?’

There is nothing particularly ‘wrong’ with SPSS as it is an excellent statistics package that does everything that you would want, however for many students it is confusing and creates a barrier to learning. The barriers arise because of the complex menu structure that is not particularly intuitive, and from the lack of a clear link between which menu items you select and the output that appears. JASP addresses both barriers; the menu structure is very straightforward, and the output immediately appears on the right-hand side of the screen. Learners can ‘play’ in JASP and try things out, knowing that any button they click can be unclicked and the output updated, without ending up with pages of outputs (like in SPSS) which leave learners feeling lost as to which is the output they should be looking at. In JASP outputs update automatically and so you can easily see the links between the functions and the output.

As use of JASP is more intuitive that SPSS you can focus more on the ‘why’ of the analysis, rather than the ‘how’.

What is JASP?

JASP is a graphical user interface (GUI) built on an R platform, R being another package for statistical analysis that you code; you can see the R code behind each of the functions in JASP. So why not just teach R? For some of the same pedagogical reasons that SPSS is problematic – here students would need to first learn how to code before they could get to grips with the analysis (the ‘how’), rather than focusing on the ‘why’ of the analysis. This could act as a barrier to learning for those for whom coding just doesn’t gel. The accessibility of the R code in JASP means that learners interested in R coding can get a little of a springboard into learning this, and learners who just want to be able to do the analysis in the most easily digestible way possible can completely ignore the R code. Everybody wins!

We hope that you enjoy using this guide, and if you have found it useful, please let us know (contact details can be found in About the Authors).

Copyright statement

Statistics with JASP: First Steps for Psychology Students copyright © 2025 by The Authors and the University of Sheffield. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except as noted otherwise here or in the text. Software shown in screenshots copyright the respective owners, for reuse permissions contact the owner(s). JASP software copyright © 2025 The JASP Team, images reproduced by permission. Microsoft Excel copyright © Microsoft Corporation.