Statistics for the Health Sciences

A Non-Mathematical Introduction

I really liked this text. I have used a lot of statistics textbooks but this one stands out as being very well designed. Firstly it is health based which suits my groups of students, covering things like testing interventions and survival analysis. Secondly it is not overly focussed on how to do stuff in SPSS or Excel as many texts are. Rather it explains the statistics and why different approaches are used and only afterwards shows students how to use SPSS to do the analysis. The screenshots and explanations for SPSS are very clear, particularly those that explain the complex output that SPSS generates and which many students find intimidating. The exercises are good - not too long or over complex and use of self study test questions at the end of each chapter will be helpful for students. It is quite detailed so will take students a long way, although some might be put off by that. Overall a great addition that I will be using in my Reserach Methods modules.

A clearly presented text with lots of relevant examples used to illustrate the statistical methods

This is an excellent text which is clear in its approach. The screen shots of SPSS guide the student through the examples and the simplistic blue and grey colour scheme does not distract the reader, but rather makes the information clear and accessible.

This book by Dancey, Reidy and Rowe gives everything it promises: a non-mathematical introduction to statistics. It contains no mathematical formula, and gives a very basic explanation of statistical theory and the most common statistical analysis techniques. In my opnion too basic perhaps, because sometimes a simple formula can explain more than a page of text. The book provides clear instructions about perfoming the analyses with SPSS, using a lot of self-explanatory screenshots.

This book is excellent and provides clear and informative feedback, that makes a difficult subject simple

I like the non-mathematical approach of this book, and I think it will be accessible to students struggling with the subject. Because it is targeted at health sciences, it covers techniques that might not otherwise be covered in a beginners' book, i.e. logistic regression and survival analysis, which is very welcome for me as a lecturer on a public health course.

This textbook is an excellent non-mathematical introduction to statistics, although some ability in mathematics is required to be able to grasp many of the core concepts. I would recommend this text rather than making it essential reading for my students because the majority choose to undertake qualitative rather than quantitative research projects. It would be a highly useful resource for anyone planning to undertake statistical analysis using SPSS as there are a number of practical examples and exercises throughout the book. I have actually referred to it in conducting my own analyses and found it to be easy to follow.

This book is going to be of great use to the half dozen or so quantitative empirical researchers that we see on this course and simply because of the number I will refer to this as supplemental. I can see the students really engaging with the simple page layouts and wording.

I found this very easy to read and understand key concepts in basic statistics. It influenced the way I delivered sessions to students and I will recommend it to support learning with the next cohort of students that I do the same statistics sessions with.

I would have adopted this book but I did not receive it in time and was not able to review it. Also, it did not have all the extra information (databases, powerpoints, etc) that came with the Andy Field book. However, I may use this book in the future.