Statistics with Confidence: An Introduction for Psychologists

This textbook offers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to statistics for all undergraduate psychology students, but particularly those in their second and third years who have already covered an initial introductory course. It covers all of the key areas in quantitative methods including sampling, significance tests, regression, and multivariate techniques and incorporates a range of exercises and problems at the end of each chapter for the student to follow.

The free CD-ROM with tutorial modules complements and enhances the exercises in the text, offers scope for distance learning, and makes both the traditional and non-traditional approaches much more accessible.

Key points of the book are: an emphasis on measurement, data summaries and graphs; a clear explanation of statistical inference using sampling distributions and confidence intervals, making significance tests much easier to understand; and help for students to understand and judge the use of particular tests in the research context beyond simple recipe following.

Michael Smithson is a Professor in the Research School of Psychology at The Australian National University in Canberra, and received his PhD from the University of Oregon. He is the author of Confidence Intervals (2003), Statistics with Confidence (2000), Ignorance and Uncertainty (1989), and Fuzzy Set Analysis for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1987), co-author of Fuzzy Set Theory: Applications in the Social Sciences (2006) and Generalized Linear Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (2014), and co-editor of Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2008) and Resolving Social Dilemmas: Dynamic, Structural, and Intergroup Aspects (1999). His other publications include more than 170 refereed journal articles and book chapters. His primary research interests are in judgment and decision making under ignorance and uncertainty, statistical methods for the social sciences, and applications of fuzzy set theory to the social sciences.