Beginning Statistics
An Introduction for Social Scientists
- Liam Foster - Sheffield University, UK
- Ian Diamond - UK National Statistician
- Julie Banton - Freelance Academic
Quantitative/Statistical Research (General)
Chapters address the following questions:
- Why bother learning statistics in the first place and are they relevant to real life?
- How do I make sensible tables and informative graphs?
- What are descriptive and inferential statistics and how are they used?
- What are regression and correlation anyway?
The book provides an excellent introduction to the concepts of statistical inference and data analysis, especially for those students who had no training in statistics. One of the appendices provides also a reminder of basic mathematics. Second edition is well-written, with updated examples and added chapter on categorical data analysis.
A good book for supplemental reading and apposite for psychology students.
Clear and actually _readable_ (not wholly expected in a stats text book!)
Some excellent examples and exercises - clear, amusing and with good explanations.
An excellent text for a basic research methods course.
I am going to recommend this book for reading, especially to students without much previous knowlegde in statistics.
I requested this book for a course in empirical methodologies that I have run for a few years. It now turned out it's my colleague who is going to run it next time but I have suggested him to let this book replace the one we have been using until now for several reasons
- The chapters follow a structure that goes well along with the way students acquire and start to work with data from a practical perspective (Our course includes an empirical project)
- The book stays within the range of statistical tools that we can reasonably get the students to understand at a beginners' course so we wont have to skip any chapters
- There is more explanation and less calculations which makes it more approachable for beginners.
Getting pre-registration nursing students to understand statistics is a challenge - for the ones who get it and want to understand more, this is a book that I will recommend for ease of reading and presentation. However, for some students it would still be too complex.
Whilst this is a useful book for the introduction of statistics it is missing the application of the statistical computer packages which most researchers will be using to analyse their data.
This book is a really nice introduction to statistics that is very student friendly, with great exercises.
Very useful introduction to statistics for students. A good place to start.
This text provides the basics for social scientists to compile and use statistics for highlighting issues in numerical terms.
