Introductory Biological Statistics

by Raymond E. Hampton

A thorough grounding in statistics is necessary for a career in any experimental science, but many students find themselves intimidated by the subject. Hampton and Havel have written this text with these students in mind. While providing the theory and assumptions necessary for a deep understanding of statistics, they make it approachable and keep it relevant to the interests of biology students. Their examples and exercises show how to choose the appropriate statistical method for a particular hypothesis and how to execute that method using problems encountered by real-world biologists. The second edition has been ambitiously updated and reorganized, facilitating clearer connections between topics and improving clarity of those that are logically distinct. A wide range of descriptive and inferential methods is covered, normal, binomial, and Poisson frequency distributions; sampling distributions; one- and two-sample t-tests; the Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests; ANOVA; randomized block and factorial designs; correlations and regression analysis; and the chi-square test and other analyses of frequencies. The accompanying CD contains large data sets (in both ASCII and Excel formats), allowing students and instructors to save time and focus on concepts rather than data entry.

Genres: Science

175 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[Christian Crowley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good material there, though there are some typos and errors in the text. The presentation was a little cute at times (lots of parentheticals with exclamation points!), though the examples and practice problems are good, and the layout makes this a good reference book.

Some of the material would be benefit from better explanation; as it is a newbie would definitely need some help to get through this. I liked the presentation of ANOVA before regression - that probably would have helped me the first time I was learning this material.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a really basic understanding of stats... and well worth it before taking a serious stats course