Basic Statistics for Psychology Students

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.