Straightforward Statistics: Understanding the Tools of Research [Hardcover]

Straightforward Statistics: Understanding the Tools of Researchis a clear and direct introduction to statistics for the social, behavioral, and life sciences. Students should find this book easy useful and engaging in its presentation while instructors should find it detailed, comprehensive, accessible, and helpful in complementing a basic course in statistics.Straightforward Statistics: Understanding the Tools of Researchis a clear and direct introduction to statistics for the social, behavioral, and life sciences. Based on the author's extensive experience teaching undergraduate statistics, this book provides a narrative presentation of the core principles that provide the foundation for modern-day statistics. With step-by-step guidance on the nuts and bolts of computing these statistics, the book includes detailed tutorials how to use state-of-the-art software, SPSS, to compute the basic statistics employed in modern academic and applied research. Across 13 succinct chapters, this text presents statistics using a conceptual approach along with information on the relevance of the different tools in different contexts and summaries of current research examples.Students should find this book easy useful and engaging in its presentation while instructors should find it detailed, comprehensive, accessible, and helpful in complementing a basic course in statistics.Preface1: Why Do I Need to Learn Statistics?- Examples of statistics in the real world- The nature of findings and facts in the behavioral sciences- Descriptive and Inferential Statistics- A conceptual approach to teaching and learning statistics- What you should get out of this class2. Describing a Single Variable- The nature of variables: continuous vs. categorical- Frequency distributions as descriptions of single variables- Creating frequency distributions- Representing frequency distributions graphically- Interpreting frequency distributions- Mean, median, and mode- Why is the mean the l“.