Undergraduate students in psychology and education come to their course in statistics with diverse expectations of a background in mathematics. Some have considerable formal training quantitative aptitude and look forward to learning statistics. Others perhaps the majority, including some of those who aspire to post graduate studies-are less confident in their quantitative skills. They regard a course in statistics are a necessary evil for the understanding or carrying out of research in their chosen field, but an evil nonetheless.
This third edition, like its predecessor, is directed primarily at the latter audience. It was written with the conviction that statistical concept describes simply without loss of accuracy and that understanding of statistical techniques as research tools can be effectively promoted by discussing them within the context of their application to concrete data rather as pure abstraction. Further, its contents are limited to those statistical techniques that are widely used in the literature of psychology and to principles underlying them.
The changes have been made in this edition reflect both of our teaching experience and the increasing prominence being given by statistics to certain topics. Thus, our discussion of some procedures, particularly those in the realm of descriptive statistics, which students grasp easily, have been shortened or rearranged. The treatment of other topic has been expanded. Greater emphasis has been placed on sampling theory, hypothesis testing, and the notion of statistical power.
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