Statistics in Plain English

Abstract

3rd ed. "Statistics in Plain English, Third Edition provides a brief, simple overview of statistics to help readers gain a better understanding of how statistics work and how to interpret them correctly. Each chapter describes a different statistical technique, ranging from basic concepts like central tendency and describing distributions to more advanced concepts such as t tests, regression, repeated measures ANOVA, and factor analysis. Each chapter begins with a short description of the statistic and when it should be used. This is followed by a more in-depth explanation of how the statistic works. Finally, each chapter ends with an example of the statistic in use, and a sample of how the results of analyses using the statistic might be written up for publication. A glossary of statistical terms and symbols is also included. ... Statistics in Plain English, Third Edition is an ideal supplement for statistics, research methods, and/or for courses that use statistics taught at the undergraduate or graduate level, or as a reference tool for anyone interested in refreshing their memory about key statistical concepts. The research examples are from psychology, education, and other social and behavioral sciences."--Publisher's description. Introduction to social science research and terminology -- Measures of central tendency -- Measures of variability -- The normal distribution -- Standardization and z scores -- Standard errors -- Statistical significance, effect size, and confidence intervals -- Correlation -- t tests -- One-way analysis of variance -- Factorial analysis of variance -- Repeated-measures analysis of variance -- Regression -- The Chi-square test of independence -- Factor analysis and reliability analysis: data reduction techniques -- Appendix A: Area under the normal curve beyond z -- Appendix B: Critical values of the t distributions -- Appendix C: Critical values of the F distributions -- Appendix D: Critical values of the studentized range statistic (for the Tukey HSD Test) -- Appendix E: Critical values of the [Chi superscript] Chi-square distributions.