Statistics for social data analysis

I used this textbook for several years teaching master's students from a broad range of disciplines, including nursing, journalism, exercise physiology, biomedical sciences, and athletic administration. Students found the material accessible, and, given the breadth of coverage, we were able to pick and choose what we needed moving at a comfortable pace. For a first course, however, I think the material on SEM, especially since it's presented in LISREL form, could be deleted. The same may be true of the chapter on logistic regression, a topic usually reserved for a second course. Nevertheless, it too is covered in an accessible and interesting fashion. Presenting material on multivariate contingency tables immediately before the material on multiple regression is a nice touch, but the choices of names for independent, dependent, and control variables for the tables are less usefully commonplace than many I can think of, such as race, education and income. This last concern, however, is a trivial matter. Sadly, the book is expensive. But then all the really good intro. texts are. For one teaching in West Virginia that makes a big difference, and considerations of cost have prompted me to switch to Levin and Fox's paperback. In any case, this is a very good book, and both my students and I have benefited from using it.

This book is a statistics textbook for students of social sciences, not high-end users. I read earlier edition of this book in undergraduate statistics course. In that course, only basics of statistics were instructed. In social sciences, they don't need to know A to Z of statistics for all they have to know is what the function of SPSS or SAS means and what kind of data is needed and how the data would be analyzed in the statistics packages. There is no need to derive the functions in the textbook mathematically as they do in the courses of statistics department. We should understand what the function means, not how it is derived. This book is written in this regard. Unlike orthodox statistics textbook, this book tackles only the meaning of the statistical methods. In doing so, this book illustrates the methods with various field works and SPSS exercises. This is the stance most textbook written for social scientists takes. It seems that this book succeed in achieving the goal. Explanations are succinct and examples are apposite. But this book is not that useful when you should do real research. Most social sciences articles use more advanced methods than what this book introduces. This book is good enough to beginners, but not so to who would be real researcher. At that point, you should have read more advanced ones already. If not, you couldn't read a piece of article in the common journals.