Psychology Statistics For Dummies - by Donncha Hanna & Martin Dempster (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Understanding statistics is a requirement for obtaining and making the most of a degree in psychology, a fact of life that often takes first year psychology students by surprise. Filled with jargon-free explanations and real-life examples, Psychology Statistics For Dummies makes the often-confusing world of statistics a lot less baffling, and provides you with the step-by-step instructions necessary for carrying out data analysis.

Psychology Statistics For Dummies:

• Serves as an easily accessible supplement to doorstop-sized psychology textbooks
• Provides psychology students with psychology-specific statistics instruction
• Includes clear explanations and instruction on performing statistical analysis
• Teaches students how to analyze their data with SPSS, the most widely used statistical packages among students

From the Back Cover

Learn to:

• Use SPSS to analyse data
• Master statistical methods and procedures using psychology-based explanations and examples
• Create better reports
• Identify key concepts and pass your course

The quick, easy way to master all the statistics you'll ever need

The bad news first: if you want a psychology degree you'll need to know statistics. Now for the good news: Psychology Statistics For Dummies. Featuring jargon-free explanations, step-by-step instructions and dozens of real-life examples, Psychology Statistics For Dummies makes the knotty world of statistics a lot less baffling. Rather than padding the text with concepts and procedures irrelevant to the task, the authors focus only on the statistics psychology students need to know. As an alternative to typical, lead-heavy statistics texts or supplements to assigned course reading, this is one book psychology students won't want to be without.

• Ease into statistics - start out with an introduction to how statistics are used by psychologists, including the types of variables they use and how they measure them
• Get your feet wet - quickly learn the basics of descriptive statistics, such as central tendency and measures of dispersion, along with common ways of graphically depicting information
• Meet your new best friend - learn the ins and outs of SPSS, the most popular statistics software package among psychology students, including how to input, manipulate and analyse data
• Analyse this - get up to speed on statistical analysis core concepts, such as probability and inference, hypothesis testing, distributions, Z-scores and effect sizes
• Correlate that - get the lowdown on common procedures for defining relationships between variables, including linear regressions, associations between categorical data and more
• Analyse by inference - master key methods in inferential statistics, including techniques for analysing independent groups designs and repeated-measures research designs

Open the book and find:

• Ways to describe statistical data
• How to use SPSS statistical software
• Probability theory and statistical inference
• Descriptive statistics basics
• How to test hypotheses
• Correlations and other relationships between variables
• Core concepts in statistical analysis for psychology
• Analysing research designs

About the Author

Donncha Hanna, PhD is a psychology lecturer at Queen's University Belfast whose primary teaching responsibilities include statistics and research methods. Martin Dempster, PhD is a health psychologist and the research coordinator for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme at Queen's University Belfast.