While a graduate student at Stanford, Nie was faced with the daunting task of analyzing data from thousands of individual responses to a survey questionnaire he collected from seven nations with his advisor and mentor Sidney Verba.
Nie served as CEO from the company's founding in 1975 until 1992, and continued as Chairman of the Board and software design consultant until 2008.
Originally invented to solve the problem of analyzing data for Nie's dissertation, SPSS soon became widely used among other social scientists and researchers.
But as demand for the product (and its new features and accompanying documentation) expanded, Nie incorporated SPSS and became its president and CEO.
[4] Nie's Chicago years saw the publication of four major books in political science, three of which won prizes of national recognition for scholarly excellence.
[7] Nie reprised his Woodrow Wilson Award in 1996, winning the prize for Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, written with Jane Junn and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry.
He remained active as an author and social scientist and published a book on the politics of the 2000 U.S. Census enumeration, The Hard Count (2006), with Ken Prewitt, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and Heili Pals.
Nie led a multidisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate students that included political scientists, economists, sociologists, and statisticians, among others, in research that included such diverse topics as how time is spent on the Internet, how Internet access affects political polarization, Latino voter mobilization, and how educational attainment affects future life outcomes.
Nie has also served as Chairman or board member for a number of high technology firms, including CustomerSat Inc.,[11] Vicinity, Lexiquest, and Captura.
Norman Nie and his wife Carol resided in Los Altos, California and Sun Valley, Idaho.