Название: Doing Statistical Analysis: A Student’s Guide to Quantitative Research
Автор: Christer Thrane
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2023
Страниц: 267
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub (true)
Размер: 30.9 MB

Doing Statistical Analysis looks at three kinds of statistical research questions – descriptive, associational, and inferential – and shows students how to conduct statistical analyses and interpret the results. Keeping equations to a minimum, it uses a conversational style and relatable examples such as football, COVID-19, and tourism, to aid understanding. Each chapter contains practice exercises, and a section showing students how to reproduce the statistical results in the book using Stata and SPSS. Digital supplements consist of data sets in Stata, SPSS, and Excel, and a test bank for instructors. Its accessible approach means this is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students across the social and behavioral sciences needing to build their confidence with statistical analysis.

There are many great books on statistics. Yet a lot of them tend to fall into one of two main types. The first comprises the classic textbooks. These books teach you the technicalities once you manage to get through the formulas, the equations, and the technical workings of the statistical techniques. Often, however, such books take practical applications lightly, although some have added outputs from statistics programs of late. The second type of books have the name of a statistics program in their title. Unsurprisingly, these books are heavy on practical applications using the program in question, but they seldom teach you much about statistics or statistical reasoning per se.

I hope this book does not fall into any of the above categories but is somewhere midway. In particular, the aim of this book is to show how to do, how to interpret, and how to report statistical analysis in research settings. The book uses the statistics programs Stata and SPSS for illustration purposes in this regard. In principle, I could have used a plethora of statistics programs (e.g., Statistica, R, SAS, or Gauss) to do the calculations. The reasons for preferring Stata and SPSS are twofold: First, both programs are popular and easy to use. Second, I have used both of them in my teaching during the last 25 years. That said, you could download the data sets accompanying this book, do the analyses in the statistics program of your choosing, and still learn all that the book has to offer.