Beginning Statistics
An Introduction for Social Scientists
- Liam Foster - Sheffield University, UK
- Ian Diamond - UK National Statistician
- Julie Banton - Freelance Academic
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?
I am going to recommend this book for reading, especially to students without much previous knowlegde in statistics.
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 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.
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.
Very thorough and easily understandable introduction into the topic, hence a great additional source for students to acquire the necessary knowledge to understand statistics. Because it has a higher practical orientation, it is better suited as recommended reading in contras to the more theoretical primary literature.
This is an excellent tool for first year undergraduates. The examples are very well thought through. Excellent book for beginners with substance in it!
This would be an essential reading for students' induction into an MSc with advanced quantitative methods
