Customer Reviews

Experimental Design: Procedures for Behavioral Sciences (Psychology)

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I have used this book as a graduate student doing social science research. The editorial reviewers got it right; Kirk emphasizes logical explanation, although computational equations are presented in tandem. The book is so expensive because it's so thick and thorough. Everything's here. You won't have to buy a bunch of other books. Just about everything to do with ANOVA and modeling is in here. A good resource.

As a doctoral student, I've had to read some really pedantic books on statistics, and believe me, there's plenty of those out there. Fortunately, this book is not one of them! Kirk uses a language that is pretty easy to understand and the logical explanations really help the reader grasp the concepts and applications of statistical techniques.

However, there are some chapters (Chapter 3 on Multiple Comparisons, for example) where the explanations are not very good. There is a lot of focus on formulas and not enough explanations for a simple way to execute the procedures. I find myself also reading Tabachnick and Fidell, "Experimental Design Using ANOVA" since these two authors explain concepts and procedures even better than Kirk. Combine both books and you get a really solid foundation in ANOVA.

I'm not into formulas since SPSS can take care of most of this for you, so the conceptual component is what I really needed, and the 2 books cover sufficiently different grounds that justify reading both. And when I need to go into SPSS, my favorite book is, "SPSS for Intermediate Statistics: Use and Interpretation" by Leech, Barrett and Morgan. This book does not merely outline step-by-step procedures for running SPSS but provide brief yet useful explanations/tips. With these 3 books, ANOVA gets really interesting and "do-able".

This text is a great purchase for any student who will be designing and performing experiments as part of his or her own research. For example, a Ph.D. student in marketing who is studying consumer behavior should read this book. As a matter of fact, it would be a great "prep" book to read before showing up to a Ph.D. program (again, only if the research program will involve performing experiments).