Computing the Standard Deviation in SPSS

The standard deviation is a measure of variability. In SPSS, you compute it by choosing Analyze/Descriptive Statistics/Descriptives...

menus for descriptives statistics

You then specify the variables you want for which you want to compute the standard deviation:

choose variables

Here is the result. Note that "Std. Deviation" is used to stand for "standard deviation.":

results of descriptive statistics

Notice that, by default, you get N, the minimum, the maximum, and the mean in addition to the standard deviation. You could have chosen more or fewer statistics by clicking the "option" button.

The syntax for computing the standard deviation is:

DESCRIPTIVES VARIABLES=Y1 Y2 Y3
/STATISTICS=MEAN STDDEV MIN MAX.

Learn More About the Standard Deviation
Overview of the standard deviation
Standard deviation as a measure of risk