Customer Reviews

Measurement, Design, and Analysis: An Integrated Approach

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an essential book for anyone doing advanced postgraduate research (especially PhD level). It is quite heavy reading but is a definitive reference on the use, interpretation and reporting of statistics, including lots of little known information about effect size, sample sizes, statistical power not covered in standard texts.

Best of all, it exposes lots of common misconceptions and mistakes committed in most published research - after reading this book, you will be amazed how often these mistakes are made even in papers published in top journals. You can be pretty sure that if you satisfy the (very rigorous) requirements of this book, that your thesis will get past any examiner!

A statistics book written FOR researchers BY researchers (rather than statisticians)

This is a very wide-ranging work, covering elements of psychometrics as well as statistics to the level of structural equation models. The book has a nice introductory tone, and should be easily grasped by most graduate students. Some of the information on CFA and SEM is now a bit dated. I smiled when I read the other reviewer's comments about Pedhazur's notable cynicism; I share his cynical view, having seen a multitude of published papers that were just garbage because the analyses were not thoughtful. Pedhazur's cynicism should be seen as a warning, and not taken beyond that, in my opinion.

This outstanding textbook is a "One Stop Shop" for the majority of essential topics for researchers with a statistical background. Exhaustive. Personnel without an anaylitical/technical background may find it hard to use. As a reference for someone doing a Phd, it is a book you'll refer to again and again.

This gi-normous tome is a beauty. It's wonderful to have design, measurement, and analysis cross-referenced within the same book. Yes, as the one low rating reviewer argues, Pedhazur and Schmelkin are rather cranky and critical, but I find their remarks go along way toward anchoring social science research in the broader landscape of formal research generally, and in the history of educational/psychological research specifically. The authors spend a good bit of text locating practices in tradition and context, and identifying changes in the practice of social science research. I find my own doctoral students benefit from as much sense of research as a professional endeavor as I can provide them. Thus, I don't have a problem with passages such as this: "The notion that the royal road to Truth, to discovery of the Laws of Nature, is through The Scientific method has until recently been part of the vision of scientific inquiry, as is exemplified by Pearson's (1911) assertion: 'There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.' ... Nothing is, of course, further from the truth."

On the other hand, I really think it's important for the instructor to be an active mediator between student and text in the case.

The book is well laid out and the examples well explained without statistical jargons that confuse people. I have forgotten most of the statistics that I learnt in school but I was able to recall and follow through while reading this book. It is easy for even the 'statistical dummies' to understand, in my opinion. I will highly recommend it for graduate students.

We used P&S (as we called it) in our PhD research methods seminar, and I still refer to it from time to time when I need to cite a source in research methodology. The intended audience of this book is definitely academic researchers and PhD students. Although I suppose a master's student with a concentration in quantitative methods might also find it useful.

P&S are comprehensive in their coverage of research methodology, particularly quantitative methods, and associated research designs. I found their chapters on instrument development, construct validation, and experimental designs particularly useful.

I also think P&S stands up well as compared to other similar works, such as Nunally, for instance. I keep both on my shelf, but I find Nunally more useful for cites that require a "rule of thumb" or justification of a particular research decision, while I find P&S more useful for "how to" aspects of research design or explanations of the many various procedures that quantitative researchers encounter in the course of their work.

Overall, I would recommend this book as a valuable addition to the library of any academician or PhD student.

The book was recieved quite rapidly and in very good condition - better than expected from a used book. I highly recommend this vendor!

I assign this book in my graduate psychology research methods seminar. I also supplement the book with original sources, but I like to have my students read the relevant chapters from P&S first, as it provides a well-written overview and framework for integrating the articles they read subsequently. I haven't found a textbook for graduate research methods that I've liked better, and believe me I've looked.

The clarity of the writing is the greatest strength of the book. Chapters are written in an extremely easy to read manner, and they communicate difficult concepts clearly. I frequently get comments from my students such as "I didn't understand the multitrait-multimethod matrix article until I read the summary of it in Pedhazur & Schmelkin."

My students also find the chapters on statistical analysis quite helpful, even though I don't cover that material in my class. I recommend this book strongly to anybody in the social sciences.

As a Ph.D. student in Psychology, I had the opportunity to use this book as my primary text for the Fall 1998 semester. The book is replete with research design principles, and illustrates its teachings through examples from past sociobehavioral studies. Unfortunately Mr. Pedhazur has become very cynical about resarch integrity, and a negative tone pervades many of his discussions. Moreover, his writing rambles and frequently becomes difficult to follow. I did not enjoy learning about sociobehavioral research from this book (and know of no one in my class who did). I give it 2 stars only for the book's broad-ranging scope and coverage.