Understanding Social Statistics

This fully revised, expanded and updated Second Edition of the bestselling 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 behavior.

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
• The updated Website at http:/www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/uss/index.html reflects changes made to the text and provides updated datasets

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 gained her DPhil in Biochemistry in 1976 to be followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Queen Elizabeth College and Imperial College, University of London. She joined Surrey University in 1981 as a researcher on several part-time contracts in the departments of Sociology, Psychology and Human Biology. In 1984 she was appointed as the Departmental Research Fellow and has been involved with the teaching of computing and quantitative methods since that time. In 1994 she took up her current lectureship in quantitative methods and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2001.

Nigel Gilbert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey, Guildford, England. He is the author or editor of 34 books and many academic papers and was the founding editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. His current research focuses on the application of agent-based models to understanding social and economic phenomena, especially the emergence of norms, culture, and innovation. He obtained a doctorate in the sociology of scientific knowledge in 1974 from the University of Cambridge and has subsequently taught at the universities of York and Surrey in England. He is one of the pioneers in the field of social simulation and is past president of the European Social Simulation Association. He is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.