Basic Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences

Each statistical procedure in this text is presented in a conceptual, intuitive manner to illustrate how it fills a need in the process. Students anxious about math will benefit from a scaled back emphasis on the discipline, plain language, and a step-by-step approach that reintroduces, reviews, and reinforces procedures. In addition, references to psychology have been reduced to make the text more inclusive of all behavioral sciences.

The text has been revised to streamline the narrative without reducing content, make presentations more concise, and add more explanatory techniques. Nearly all examples include specific variables and questions rather than generic data, and most are taken from everyday life so that students gain an intuitive feel for the meaning of scores and develop an ability to think in statistical terms.

• Summary tables and charts help students organize and remember related topics.
• An opening section in each chapter, Why Is It Important to Know About...?, introduces the major topic, immediately placing it in a research context.
• Key terms are bold within the text, reviewed in the chapter summary, and listed in a new section at the end of the text.
• Reference tables provide guidelines for selecting from the descriptive and inferential procedures discussed in the text based on the type of data or research design employed.

Gary Heiman is a professor at Buffalo State College. Praised by reviewers and adopters for his readable prose and effective pedagogical skills, he has written four books for Houghton Mifflin (now Cengage Learning): STATISTICS FOR THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, RESEARCH METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY, UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH METHODS AND STATISTICS, AND ESSENTIAL STATISTICS FOR THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Bowling Green State University.