Statistics for Social Data Analysis

Rating:
Summary: For students of social sciences
Review: This book is a statistics textbook for students of social sciences, not high-end users. I read earlier edition of this book in undergraduate statistics course. In that course, only basics of statistics were instructed. In social sciences, they don't need to know A to Z of statistics for all they have to know is what the function of SPSS or SAS means and what kind of data is needed and how the data would be analyzed in the statistics packages. There is no need to derive the functions in the textbook mathematically as they do in the courses of statistics department. We should understand what the function means, not how it is derived. This book is written in this regard. Unlike orthodox statistics textbook, this book tackles only the meaning of the statistical methods. In doing so, this book illustrates the methods with various field works and SPSS exercises. This is the stance most textbook written for social scientists takes. It seems that this book succeed in achieving the goal. Explanations are succinct and examples are apposite.
But this book is not that useful when you should do real research. Most social sciences articles use more advanced methods than what this book introduces. This book is good enough to beginners, but not so to who would be real researcher. At that point, you should have read more advanced ones already. If not, you couldn't read a piece of article in the common journals.