FACILITATING OBJECTIVITY AND RELIABILITY OF ISLAMIC STUDIES RESEARCHES WITH THE USE OF (IBM SPSS) STATISTICAL PACKAGE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES

Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS) is a software package tool used for analysis in Social Sciences, Humanities, Education and partly in the Sciences. It is used in research analysis for establishing reliability and validity of instruments which culminate in reliable data and findings. Observations and interactions with Islamic Studies teachers and students indicate that they lack the knowledge of SPSS, a software tool used in analysis. The practice presently across the world is that no researcher runs analysis manually for the fact that it is time consuming, prone to errors and enables the researcher to tailor the findings toward his mindset. Use of SPSS on the other hand, helps to give accurate data, guides in coding, helps in tracking variables appropriately. It saves a lot of time in running analysis, helps in electronically establishing reliability of data, gives adequate information on the research, assists in tracking errors and helps in establishing independent results different from what the researcher had in mind. The rationale for this study is to introduce the use of SPSS into Islamic Studies researches and to make Islamic Studies researchers meet international standard as regards conducting researches with global standard practice. It is also to enable them write acceptable journals and win research grants which may be difficult to achieve without using software packages. The researcher adopted documentary and observatory approaches, reviewed and observed one hundred (100) articles written on Islamic Studies. Findings revealed that all the articles did not contain any use of SPSS or any other research software tool. There is need for basic knowledge and usage of SPSS software tool in Islamic researches to make Islamic researchers cultivate its usage in order to write empirically acceptable and fruitful researches to enable them meet international standard and global competitiveness.