Reading Statistics and Research (5th ed.)

The users of this book can be teachers of measurement, research, and statistics courses. Also, this book can be valuable to researchers and consumers of research as a reference. The book is written with an easy-to-understand explanation of a variety of topics and techniques used in research. There are no formulas or computational examples to confuse a person who just wants to know what a technique is or the basic information about a topic. There are review terms, items in the companion website, and exercises inside Research Navigator at the end of each chapter. Chapter 1 explains the typical format of a journal article. This chapter familiarizes the reader with what to expect to see in any journal article. To some degree, Chapter 1 lays the ground work for the rest of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 are about descriptive statistics and bivariate correlation. Graphs, measures of central tendency, measures of variability, standard scores, the correlation coefficient, and different kinds of correlational procedures are covered in these chapters. Chapter 4 is on reliability and validity. Both terms are well-defined, and different approaches to estimating reliability and validity are presented. The author’s comments at the end of the chapter are excellent and quite practical. Chapter 5 covers foundations of inferential statistics. Here is where the concept of inference and sampling techniques is presented. Some common problems in sampling are addressed, such as low response rate and attrition. This chapter lays the groundwork for many of the later chapters.