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Basic Statistics for Psychology Students

• By Marc Brysbaert

• Price: $70.00 $63.00
• Binding: Hardback (also available in Paperback)
• Pages: 346
• Published by: Psychology Press
• Publication Date: 1st June 2009 (Available for Pre-order)
• ISBN: 978-1-84169-509-9

About the Book

Basic Statistics for Psychology Students is a highly readable textbook specifically tailored for the needs of first-year undergraduate psychology students, and geared towards helping students get over their fears that they might not be good at maths.

Divided into twelve easily digestible chapters, the book explains, in step-by-step form, what the different statistics mean and how statistics can help to organize and interpret data. It covers the basics of descriptive statistics, including the most frequently used inferential tests for research designs with two conditions (t-tests and their non-parametric alternatives, parametric and non-parametric correlation coefficients). Mathematical formulas are limited as much as possible and are illustrated throughout with simple calculation examples. The book also includes a number of helpful features:

• Each chapter ends with a section showing students how to write their own short Excel programs to calculate their statistics and run their own analyses.

• Key term explanations are provided and students are prepared for more advanced courses in which software packages (e.g., SPSS) are introduced for analyses of more complicated designs.

• This book is also one of the first that fully integrates confidence intervals within the description of the different tests, indicating how they should be drawn in graphs and how they are to be interpreted.

This book is an ideal introduction to basic statistics for students in psychology and the social sciences.

Table of Contents

Preface. 1. Different Types of Research and the Statistics we are Likely to Calculate for Them. 2. Summarizing the Data: Frequency Distributions. 3. Summarizing the Data: Measures of Central Tendency. 4. Summarizing the Data: Measures of Variability. 5. Z-scores and the Normal Distribution. 6. Is there a Difference between Two Groups of People?: The t-test for Independent Groups. 7. How to Interpret the Results of a Statistical Test? 8. Is there a Difference between two groups of people?: Alternative, Non-Parametric Tests for Independent Groups. 9. Do Individuals Respond to my Intervention?: The t-test for Related Samples. 10. Do Individuals Respond to my Intervention?: The Non-Parametric Alternative for Related Samples. 11. Improving our Prediction: The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation. 12. Non-Parametric Statistics to Improve our Prediction: The Spearman Rank Correlation and the Chi-Square Test for Independence.

About the Author(s)

Marc Brysbaert is Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.