---

Keywords: Statistics, data analysis, SPSS Title: Understanding and Using Advanced Statistics Authors: Jeremy Foster, Emma Barkus and Christian Yavorsky Publisher: SAGE ISBN: 141290014X Media: Book Level: Intermediate stats Verdict: A useful resource for the non-statistician

Buy US Buy UK

For the non-statistician student, researcher or academic the array of advanced statistical techniques available for analysing data can be bewildering. Selecting the wrong statistic can be disastrous, rendering analyses worthless or providing results of dubious value. The easy power of tools such as SPSS or Minitab, which provide a wide range of statistics with relatively little effort, only makes the problem worse.

For anyone faced with the transition to more advanced techniques, such as mutlivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), multiple regression, log-linear analysis, logistic regression and so on, some help is at hand. This slim little book aims to help the reader in choosing the technique most appropriate to the data. For each of the techniques there is a brief outline, examples of the types of data it is appropriate for, an explanation of the results from SPSS, some concrete examples from the literature as well as FAQs, references and other supporting material.

Obviously this is not Statistics for Dummies, nor is it Intro Stats. It assumes a reasonable level of basic statistical knowledge, certainly it assumes a familiarity with analysis of variance (ANOVA), but it is not primarily a book that teaches statistics. There is little in the way of mathematical formulae or notation, nor are there step by step algorithms to learn. The approach is basically to help the reader select an appropriate technique and to use a SPSS or similar do all the donkey work. The emphasis is on understanding the results not on the underlying maths.