Customer Reviews

Data Analysis: A Model Comparison Approach, Second Edition

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This book is a fantastic graduate-level data analysis (statistics) text. The writing style is clear and compelling. It is ideal for the scientist/researcher who want to ask practical questions of their data without being forced into standard statistical recipes. I have been searching for a statistics text like this for nearly 10 years and am very pleased to have found it.
The book focuses you, the reader, on composing powerful, but simply-formed models of the questions you wish to ask of your data. It builds a unified approach to data analysis from first principles rather than presenting the typical hodge-podge of cookbook techniques found in many traditional statistics texts. Instead of trying to fit your data into a recipe (t-test, ANOVA, regression, ANCOVA, etc.) you specify a pair (or multiple pairs) of model equations and then use them to ask quantitative questions of your data. Thus, you spend your time asking questions of your data not forcing it into some pre-determined recipe which may be an ill fit. In addition to answering standard "recipe" questions, with this approach you can easily generate and answer questions that fall between the standard recipes, but that are quite valid to ask.
The text presents exactly as much math as necessary to understand the tools, but not more: it does not require a heavy mathematical background. The authors use the text in a graduate level psychology class, but it the book is applicable to those with a more or less quantitative background.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a deep analysis of whatever data might cross your desk.

I'm not going to write a long review of the book itself because C. Long expressed the immense virtues of this book perfectly--I just wanted to share my experience with it.

I was a student of Drs. Judd and McClelland in a year-long graduate level stats (oops! "Data analysis") course. Although this was nominally a Psychology course, its qualities were so famous that people came from departments all over the University to take it, such as Education, Science, Business, and others. I've taken stats a number of times over the years, and never really "got it"--it was all so mysterious with all these seemingly different test types. This was the first course in which I actually completely understood the underlying concepts! Believe it or not, it made statistics and data analysis exciting! I haven't actually used these techniques now in a couple of years, but have recently had need to brush up and start using them again. All the basic concepts are as fresh in my mind as the year I took this course, and I'm confident I'll be up to speed very quickly with just a quick refresh browse of the book.

I can't recommend this text highly enough!

P.S. Oh, yeah... yes, I got an "A"... ;)