| This book is designed to help students learn how to analyze and interpret research data with intermediate statistics. It is intended to be a supplemental text in an intermediate statistics course in the behavioral sciences or education and it can be used in conjunction with any mainstream text. We have found that the book makes SPSS for windows easy to use so that it is not necessary to have a formal, instructional computer lab; you should be able to learn how to use SPSS on your own with this book. Access to the SPSS program and some familiarity with Windows is all that is required. Although SPSS for Windows is quite easy to use, there is such a wide variety of options and statistics that knowing which ones to use and how to interpret the printouts can be difficult, so this book is intended to help with these challenges.
Our approach in this book is to present how to use and interpret SPSS in the context of proceeding as if the HSB data were the actual data from your research project. However, before starting the SPSS assignments, we have three introductory chapters. The first chapter is an introduction and review of research design and how it would apply to analyzing the HSB data. In addition chapter includes a review of measurement and descriptive statistics. Chapter 2 discusses rules for coding data, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and assumptions. Much of what is done in this chapter involves preliminary analyses to get ready to answer the research questions that you might state in a report. |
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