Understanding Social Statistics / Edition 2

by Jane L. Fielding, Nigel Gilbert

Overview

This fully revised, expanded and updated Second Edition of the bestselling textbook by Jane Fielding and Nigel Gilbert provides a comprehensive yet accessible guide to quantitative data analysis. Designed to help take the fear out of the use of numbers in social research, this textbook introduces students to statistics as a powerful means of revealing patterns in human behavior. The textbook covers everything typically included in an introductory course on social statistics for students in the social sciences and the authors have taken the opportunity of this Second Edition to bring the data sources as current as possible. The book is full of up-to-date examples and useful and clear illustrations using the latest SPSS software.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412910545
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	02/14/2006
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	7.32(w) x 9.13(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jane Fielding gained her DPhil in Biochemistry in 1976 to be followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Queen Elizabeth College and Imperial College, University of London. She joined Surrey University in 1981 as a researcher on several part-time contracts in the departments of Sociology, Psychology and Human Biology. In 1984 she was appointed as the Departmental Research Fellow and has been involved with the teaching of computing and quantitative methods since that time. In 1994 she took up her current lectureship in quantitative methods and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2001.

Nigel Gilbert read for a first degree in Engineering, intending to go into the computer industry. However, he was lured into sociology and obtained his doctorate on the sociology of scientific knowledge from the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Michael Mulkay. His research and teaching interests have reflected his continuing interest in both sociology and computer science (and engineering more widely).


His main research interests are processual theories of social phenomena, the development of computational sociology and the methodology of computer simulation, especially agent-based modelling. He is Director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation.


He is also Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Studies and responsible for its development as a leading centre for intellectual interchange.


He is the author or editor of several textbooks on sociological methods of research and statistics and editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

Table of Contents

Numbers, Data and Analysis
Using Computers in Statistics
Univariate Statistics
Graphics for Display
Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion
Graphics for Analysis
The Normal Curve
Correlation and Regression
Bivariate Analysis
Categorical Data
Tables
Sampling and Inference
Testing Hypotheses
Modelling Data

Editorial Reviews

'Understanding Social Statistics is aimed at undergraduate sociology students, but it would also be useful to mature seekers of statistical expertise. It is well written, attractively laid out and uses a language that demystifies the subject, instead of cloaking it with obscure technical terms' - Times Higher Education Supplement

From the Publisher