"...I know of no better book of its kind..." (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol 169 (1), January 2006) A revised and updated edition of this bestselling introductory textbook to statistical analysis using the leading free software package R This new edition of a bestselling title offers a concise introduction to a broad array of statistical methods, at a level that is elementary enough to appeal to a wide range of disciplines. Step-by-step instructions help the non-statistician to fully understand the methodology.  The book covers the full range of statistical techniques likely to be needed to analyse the data from research projects, including elementary material like t--tests and chi--squared tests, intermediate methods like regression and analysis of variance, and more advanced techniques like generalized linear modelling. Includes numerous worked examples and exercises within each chapter.

Popular in previous editions, this Third Edition continues to help build students' confidence and ability in doing statistical analysis by slowly moving from concepts that require little computational work to those that require more. Author R. Mark Sirkin once again demonstrates how statistics can be used so that students come to appreciate their usefulness rather than fear them. Statistics for the Social Sciences emphasizes the analysis and interpretation of data to give students a feel for how data interpretation is related to the methods by which the information was obtained.

This book was written for those who need to know how to collect, analyze and present data. It is meant to be a first course for practitioners, a book for private study or brush-up on statistics, and supplementary reading for general statistics classes. The book is untraditional, both with respect to the choice of topics and the presentation: Topics were determined by what is most useful for practical statistical work, and the presentation is as non-mathematical as possible. The book contains many examples using statistical functions in spreadsheets. In this second edition, new topics have been included e.g. within the area of statistical quality control, in order to make the book even more useful for practitioners working in industry.

This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly.  It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well.  By the end of the first seven chapters, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. The remaining four chapters will begin to introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available such as how to use contributed libraries or write programs in R. The book details how to perform nearly every task routinely associated with statistical modeling: descriptive statistics, basic inferences, estimating common models, and conducting regression diagnostics. For the intermediate or advanced reader, the book aims to open up the wide array of sophisticated methods options that R makes freely available. It illustrates how user-created libraries can be installed and used in real data analysis, focusing on a handful of libraries that have been particularly prominent in political science. The last two chapters illustrate how the user can conduct linear algebra in R and create simple programs. A key point in these chapters will be that such actions are substantially easier in R than in many other programs, so advanced techniques are more accessible in R, which will appeal to scholars and policy researchers who already conduct extensive data analysis.  Additionally, the book should draw the attention of students and teachers of quantitative methods in the political disciplines.