This fully revised, expanded and updated Second Edition of the best-selling textbook by Jane Fielding and Nigel Gilbert provides a comprehensive yet accessible guide to quantitative data analysis. Designed to help take the fear out of the use of numbers in social research, this textbook introduces students to statistics as a powerful means of revealing patterns in human behaviour.
The textbook covers everything typically included in an introductory course on social statistics for students in the social sciences and the authors have taken the opportunity of this Second Edition to bring the data sources as current as possible. The book is full of up-to-date examples and useful and clear illustrations using the latest SPSS software.
While maintaining the student-friendly elements of the first, such as chapter summaries, exercises at the end of each chapter, and a glossary of key terms, new features to this edition include:
- Updated examples and references
- SPSS coverage and screen-shots now incorporate the current version 14.0 and are used to demonstrate the latest social statistics datasets;
- Additions to content include a brand new section on developing a coding frame and an additional discussion of weighting counts as a means of analyzing published statistics;
- Enhanced design aids navigation which is further simplified by the addition of core objectives for each chapter and bullet-pointed chapter summaries;
Contents
Part 1
- Numbers, data and analysis
- Using computers in statistics
Part 2 Univariate analysis
- Univariate statistics
- Graphics for display
- Measures of central tendency & dispersion
- Graphics for analysis
- The normal curve
Part 3 Bivariate analysis
- Correlation and regression: bivariate analysis
- Categorical data: tables
- Sampling and inference
- Testing hypotheses
- Modelling data
A valuable and practical guide for students dealing with the large amounts of data that are typically collected in social surveys, the Second Edition of Understanding Social Statistics is an essential textbook for courses on statistics and quantitative research across the social sciences.
Jane Fielding is Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology at the University of Surrey.
Nigel Gilbert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. He has written and edited many books,including the bestselling textbook Researching Social Life (Second edition, Sage 2001).
Understanding Social Statistics may be bought from your local bookshop, from the publisher or from a number of on-line bookstores such as Amazon.