Psychology Statistics For Dummies

by Donncha Hanna, Martin Dempster

The introduction to statistics that psychology students can't afford to be without 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:

Genres: Psychology, Mathematics, Science, Nonfiction, Reference

464 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2012

Reviews

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

single handedly saving my grade 🙏🏼

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In all honest, I’ve found this to be one of the most useful books in the subject, which really surprised me. My friend brought this to a revision session prior to our exam and everyone was using it, finding it way more helpful than a number of other suggested reads. Honestly, I never expected it to be so good.

In fact, I may have to look at other ‘For Dummies’ books as I was given way more than I expected.

[Laura Mcaliley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful

This is a plain-spoken book that is useful for learning the fundamentals about SPSS. Also a good reference for the future. Supplemented with a class and a great instructor, learning how to do this kind of analysis can be beneficial to your career.

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Psychology Statistics For Dummies which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. 51% of students about to study psychology at an under graduate level don't realize that a major component of the subject is statistics. There is loads of statistical data on every form of therapy and every drug and you need to understand this data and how it relates to a patient with a certain illness and expressing certain symptoms and what the right treatment is for him. Certain drugs and therapies work better with certain symptoms and not so well with others. Drug companies especially would us to believe the drug they manufacture is the best and is effective in every case and will often skew data or dress it up the way they want and you need to be able to see through this. The standard software used for psychology statistics is SPSS or Statistical Program For Social Science and this program was first released in 1968 and in 2011 the version 20 was released which this book looks at. IBM bought the rights to the program in 2010. You would have difficulty using Microsoft Excel to do the job because while it is a statistical program you have to enter each formula and have to apply them to a column where as in SPSS you have to just click on the appropriate formula and can apply it to just one cell. A lot of the statistics in this book I didn't understand but it's an interesting book.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purchasing this book just for the SPSS information is well worth it. The fact that there are other concepts within the book is just icing on the cake. My husband is in psychology and I am in education. Our worlds often collide. It's been awhile since I've been in school, some my statistics are rusty; however, I'm heavy into educational research. Currently, the only type of educational research that receives federal funding is quantitative. So, here comes statistics that I haven't studied in (dare I say) 10 years. The university has thankfully provided me with SPSS to crunch numbers, but no training or manual on how to use it. This has been a LIFE SAVER! For the amount of money that software manuals cost and the fact that you have to be a computer genius in order to understand the lingo, a general book for dummies is the way to go. This book is very easy to read. It is laid out perfectly for a quick reference if you have a question and the directions for SPSS helped me work through the software on my very first try.

[Nik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stats is stats and stats stat. Stats about all I got to say about stat.
Helpful when you're in a bind of understanding, but being the only 'for dummies' book I've ever referred to, I imagine stats what they're all like. They'll simplify stuff enough to get you through, but to be honest, the subject is pretty dry...
Just wanted that subject of my degree over... Stat!