Understanding and Using Statistics in Psychology

Understanding and Using Statistics in Psychology: A Practical Introduction

by Jeremy Miles and Philip Banyard

What the critics say: "Not as many jokes as Andy Field's book, but cheaper".

You might like to visit the learning statistics blog (that's where announcements relating to these pages will appear).

Jeremy Miles's Home page, which has links to stuff on some other books, and general stuff about me, is here.

You'll find on these pages an FAQ, and supplemental information, divided up by chapters.

(I haven't got around to putting the datasets up yet - if you want them before I have, then send me an email, and I'll send them to you. Let me know what format you want.)

FAQ
Chapter 1 Things
Chapter 2 Things
Chapter 3 Things
Chapter 4 Things
Chapter 5 Things
Chapter 6 Things
Chapter 7 Things
Chapter 8 Things
Chapter 9 Things
Chapter 10 Things
Chapter 11 Things

FAQ

Why should I buy this book?
If you're a psychology student, and want to know more about statistics, this might be the book for you. Of course, you don't have to buy it. You might borrow it from a library, or steal it from a friend.

What's it about?
Well, it's like a lot of other books on statistics in some ways. But different in others. It's about statistics, and the kinds of statistics that you will encounter in an undergraduate psychology degree in statistics.
Here are the chapters:

Introduction: How to get started with statistics.
Descriptive Statistics
Samples, populations and the normal distribution.
Making Inferences: Confidence Limits and Statistical Significance
Analysing Data from Repeated Measures Experiments
Analysing data from independent groups: Continuous and Ordinal Measures
Analysing Data from Independent Groups: Categorical Measures
Relationships between Variables: Correlation and Regression
Introducing Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
Analysing questionnaires and measurement instruments
Thinking some more about statistics
Report writing

Looks like most other books on statistics. How's it different?
Well, yes it does look similar - and that's because we have to cover the same basic material. It's different in a couple of ways.
First, every dataset that we have is real, and from a published piece of research. If you want to know how the data are used, you can find the article and read about it.
Second, we focus on the statistics, not on the computer. The problem that some people have when they learn statistics is that they have to learn two things: how a computer program works, and how the statistics work. Learning about one thing is hard enough, learning about two is really hard. If you really understand the statistics first, the computer bit is easy - so we've separated them. Each chapter is about statistics, and then at the end of each chapter we cover how it's done in SPSS.
Then we have some stuff that you don't get in many introductory statistics books, but we think they are important, so we put them in. Things like the problems of significance tests, Bayes' theorem and power.

I don't use SPSS. Why don't you cover my favourite program?
We'd like to cover more, but we don't have the space - it would make the book too heavy to fit in your satchel, and too many trees would die to create it. If you really, really want a different program, we'll try to put it on this website, as some extra material. (We use SAS, R and Stata, as well as SPSS). However, once you've understood the material, doing it in any program is pretty straightforward.

Where can I buy it?
Well, you could support your local neighbourhood independent bookshop - they're run by nice people, and nowadays you can have a cup of tea and sit down in a comfy chair while you read the books. Then you don't have to buy them. Or you could buy it from Amazon. (Which is what we usually do). If you look at the Amazon page, you should also (at some point in the future) be able to look through, and read parts of the book.

Did you know that Milgram failed his statistics exam, and was almost thrown off his PhD?
Well, there you go, there's hope for us all.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Links

Open office is available from: www.openoffice.org

You can find lots of online distribution calculators using Google. Here's one that we particularly like: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~naras/jsm/examplebot.html.

Here's the links to the two surveys that we mention. Student debt in the Guardian, smoking in Scotland.
Here's the UK Data Archive.