Essential Statistics

This reader-friendly book covers all information essential to statistics in the social sciences, from z-tests to the two-way ANOVA. It presents material through a conversational style approach, focusing on reducing anxiety about statistics, making statistics relevant and interesting, and incorporating SPSS to show users how to analyze data efficiently. To encourage readers¿ enthusiasm of statistics and hold their interest, this book includes only those analyses that are necessary to build skills or will likely be used by them in the future. Part I, the Introduction, defines many research terms, and introduces math. The second part, DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS, introduces classifications of variables, simple frequency tables and graphs, shapes of distributions, measures of central tendency and variability, descriptive z-scores , and simple frequency distributions. Part III, INFERENTIAL STATISTICS: EXPERIMENTS AND QUASI-EXPERIMENTS covers probability, hypothesis testing, t-tests, and ANOVAs by hand and using SPSS. The fourth section, INFERENTIAL STATISTICS: CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH, covers correlation, linear regression, and chi squared. The fifth section offers APPENDICES to cover additional designs: the one-way repeated-measures ANOVA, as well as multiple linear regression. SPSS layout, data analysis, and output for these designs are also covered. For statisticians in the social sciences.