Title:	Using Statistics in Social Research
Authors:	Scott M. Lynch
Keywords:	Social Research
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	This book began as a collection of lecture notes and has evolved over the last several years into its current form. My goal in putting the book together was to remedy some problems I perceive with extant introductory statistics texts. To that end, this book has several features that differentiate it from standard texts. First, typical introductory statistics texts are now commonly over 500 pages long. To be blunt, I don’t believe that students actually read texts when they are so lengthy. So, although a 500C-page book may be chock-full of examples, illustrations, and interesting side information, such detail is offset by the fact that students will not read it. Here, I have tried to provide limited, but sufficient, examples of concepts and to keep the actual text limited to about 200 pages. In doing so, I have not covered a number of statistical methods that are not commonly used, like Fisher’s exact test, Kruskal’s Tau, and the Spearman correlation. While these, and similar, methods are certainly still used, they have limited application in contemporary social research. Thus, they can be investigated in detail by students when needed in the future (e.g., for a thesis or other research paper) via other sources. Second, in this book, I integrate statistics into the research process, both philosophically and practically. From a philosophical perspective, I discuss the difficulties with concepts like “proof” and “causality” in a deductive scientific and statistical framework. From a practical perspective, I discuss how research papers are constructed, including how statistical material should be presented in tables and figures, and how results and discussion sections should be written. Third, I emphasize probability theory and its importance to the process of inference to a greater extent than many books do. Most books discuss probability theory, but I feel its relationship with statistics is underdeveloped. In this book, probability is painstakingly shown to be the basis for statistical reasoning.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/52591
ISBN:	978-1-4614-8573-5
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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