Customer Reviews

Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (Introducing Statistical Methods S.) (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a lifesaver and the bonus is that it's actually enjoyable to read. Unlike most statistics authors, Andy Field seems human AND he can write clearly! I was lost in a graduate school statistics course for most of a year, with one of those professors who can't teach at all and who requires you to read one of those stats textbooks that is just a bunch of numbers on every page (probably written by one of those people who is smart in math but flunked English).

I am hopeless with computers and terrible in math. Our SPSS assignments in my grad course were killing me.

I tried hiring a tutor and HE got things wrong. Finally it occurred to me to do a search on Amazon, by customer review, and that's how I found Andy Field's book. Immediately, I read the chapter on the topic for the assignment I was working on. Wow! Crystal clear instructions on each and every step of the analysis. This book tells you exactly what keys to press on your computer and uses pictures from the computer screen to show you exactly what to do. You just read and follow along. And THEN...THEN!...the beauty of it...it shows you pictures of the printout and explains what everything means. I could cry from happiness. Before Fields' book it would take me a couple days of struggling, crying and swearing to finish one simple SPSS assignment. With Fields' book, it took me less than half an hour. AND...drum roll...I got my first A+ in the course.

Dear Andy, if you're reading this, could you please please write similar books for more advanced stats topics, and could you write similar books for the SAS program?

Now I use Amazon.com searches organized by customer reviews, to look up any and all books I need. With great results

this 2nd edition is a major improvement of the authors first effort. it is well written, sprinkled with humor, and fairly comprehensive. it would have been nice if some items such as ROC curves and interrupted time series analysis had been included, but otherwise a very worthy effort indeed. my bias would have been to be a bit more comprehensive and to have lost the equations to save on space. considering that most other stats books are completely besotted with equations and statistical jargon that makes them unreadable, this does deserve 5 stars. in general, most statisticians who write books forget who their audience is .. they are not writing for each other .. they are writing for people in the real world who don't care about the equations .. they need to identify meaningful associations and results. In any case, this book works and i highly recommend it to anyone who is starting to use SPSS. although before they tackle this, i would strongly urge any novice to statistics to take a look at "PDQ Statistics" by Norman and Strier. that book is just spectacular .. short, funny, and unbelievably informative, especially for anyone working in the life sciences.

I've read the other reviews and I generally agree: This is a well written stats book, especially if you are trying to learn the underlying theories rather than just randomly banging around on a keyboard.

However, don't expect this book to be a particularly good choice if you need to do anything too elaborate. Even though this book is 770+ pages long, Field doesn't address realistic scenarios. For example, even though he devotes about 210 pages to all sorts of ANOVA, there is no mention of repeated measures ANCOVA, which is not that unusual. Another example is that while he devotes a whole chapter to exploratory factor analysis, he only briefly mentions confirmatory factor analysis, which is the preferred method in most cases. In some places, he seems to suggest that something is difficult (e.g., contrasts in repeated measures ANOVA) and then offers only weak examples of what to do about it with no mention of how to report what you've done. In fact, he offers very few examples of how to report results, and in some cases, his running examples are nonsignificant so his reporting examples stop short.

All together, this is a good stats theory book with an intro to SPSS, but it's not the kind of book that is going to get you through many real-world analyses. I would recommend this book to undergraduate and graduate students, but folks hoping to survive the peer-review process should probably supplement this book with others. I think Field would be better off dividing the book into smaller works (e.g., devote one whole text to analysis of variance) and spending more time on each topic, rather than expanding on this edition.

I am a 4th year PhD student and wish I had discovered this book earlier. It is far better than any of the graduate level statistics course I have taken, and definitely better than any of the textbooks I have seen. In fact, I have thrown out all my other statistics textbooks - this is the only one I need. Aside from explaining the theory in an easy to understand way, Andy Field provides the practical aspect that no other texts or courses do (or, if they do, they fail to link it to the theory). Field shows you how to use SPSS to implement the theory in an easy, step by step way; he even tells you how to report the results in APA format. Don't waste your money on any other statistics textbooks!

This should be the first book you buy if you need help with stats and SPSS. When I first began doing empirical research I knew almost nothing about statistics or SPSS, and had to learn virtually everything I needed to know about complex multivariate tests on my own. I had suffered through many of the relevant, canonical books before I happened upon Field. It was a V-8 moment. Not only does the book explain everything in engaging, easy to understand, often hilarious terms (a favorite example is the caption of the photo of statistician Bonferroni: "Carlo Bonferroni before the celebrity of his correction lead to drink, drugs and statistics groupies"), but again and again it answered questions I had that other sources didn't address in a practical way. One example out of many is how to calculate and interpret effect sizes, which SPSS doesn't calculate for all multivariate tests, or calculates using a measure that has been widely criticized. Field describes the rationale behind several measures of effect size as well as formulas for calculating them, including clear indicators of where to find the data in SPSS output.

Other reviewers have commented that this book is light on theory. I don't know enough about statistical theory to know if this is a valid criticism. But, I do think the book provides ample and detailed "whys" behind the "hows" that I haven't found elsewhere and that were necessary to help me justify the tests I run and how I interpret them. The level of detail and abstraction, in my opinion, is completely appropriate for most researchers and students.

I love this book. It covers everything from the most basic t-tests and ANOVAs to factor analysis. It tells you the basics of what the test is meant to do, what sort of data is appropriate for it and it tells you how to actually run and read the test in SPSS.

It isn't the best book for someone who wants a detailed explaination of how to calculate a statistical test by hand and it doesn't give extensive detail on the assummptions required for each test. Nonetheless, it's a great quick reference book, particularly if you've already had a statistics course and you just need a refresher. Graduate students will find it useful.

Whoever thought a stats book could be both useful and fun? This book manages to be both. It came highly endorsed by an instructor I trusted but from a fairly serious-minded context. Imagine my surprise at the subtitle ("sex, drugs and rock n roll"). Stats is a necessary evil, given my research position, and does not comes easily to me. People often say to me "but you have a Ph.D." I do, but it's in Anthropology, a field in which you are tacitly taught to distrust numbers and technology. So, having to know stats and use SPSS seemed like torture until I was led to this book. Now I at least have an understandable and friendly guide on my shelf to counteract the dour textbooks I have collected over the years on quantitative methods.

Andy Field rocks! He has done the seemingly impossible: written a thorough, logical book on statistics that is not only understandable but entertaining. I'm a PhD student and this is one of the best books on my book shelf - I use it constantly. And - I crack up every time I think about 'Mahlanobis thinking of his distances' and 'Kolmogorov wishing he had a Smirnov'.....

If only more scientific and technical writers could write and teach like Andy Field!!!

Statistics books are either too hard or way too basic for non-statisticians.

Statistic-Software books just tell you how to run tests, but they don't help you understand what you are doing.

Don't let the book's title fool you: this book is about statistics first. Only after you have the information about what you need to do, it tells about how to do it in SPSS. The explanations are awesome, and the style, although a little too informal at times, makes it easier to read than any other statistics book I've ever read.

I just missed a section on random factors for the general linear model.

I suffered through almost an entire semester before discovering Andy Field's textbook and accompanying web site, www.statisticshell.com. What I have found has not only made me enjoy learning about the subject, it makes me want to teach statistics one day - because he has shown me how it can be done so well!

Andy has a funny, engaging writing style that keeps you interested through the text. He breaks complex concepts down into easy, digestible chunks, and is more concerned with producing information in a format that students can use. Material is differentiated into easy, medium, and difficult levels - there is even a section of each chapter geared to students who are cramming desperately for a final. SPSS function and output is explained as well.

Also, his is the first statistics textbook I have ever seen that creates examples around the "beer goggles" effect (how people become more attractive the more alcohol you consume) or whether elves or reindeer are capable of discovering the better santa! The book is an educational as it is entertaining, and I wish I had not wasted any money on the "well-respected" stats text my prof told us all to buy. The concepts are the same no matter what text you use, but this one will explain them in an informative and engaging way. I would absolutely buy this book if you are at all discouraged or demoralized by statistics, as Andy Field's approach will completely turn it around - it did for me.