Product Description

Research Methods & Statistics in Psychology, 4th edition, has been substantially revised and updated, and provides a clear and comprehensive survey of research methods, statistical concepts and procedures in psychology today.

Clear explanations of experimental and non-experimental designs are provided and there is detailed attention to a wide range of threats to internal and external validity. Quasi-experiments, cross-cultural issues, ethics and the ongoing quantitative–qualitative debate are all fully explored.

Statistical procedures are given clear and comprehensive coverage, and include everything needed at all levels of study – from nominal level tests to multi-factorial ANOVA designs and multiple regression. New to the fourth edition are log linear analysis and a detailed examination of effect size and power, enabling students to report very easily the level of power for their findings.

Also new for this edition are detailed and illustrated SPSS instructions for all statistical procedures covered in the book, including data entry and interpreting output, thus eliminating the need for an extra SPSS textbook.

Each chapter contains a self-test glossary, key terms and exercises. Advice on planning and conducting studies, analysing data and writing up practical reports is given, and a ‘good’ marked report is included, as well as a complete published qualitative report. A much-requested new feature is advice, for each statistical test, on how to report results in conventional (APA) style.

The bestselling research methods text for over a decade, Research Methods & Statistics in Psychology, 4th edition, remains accessible, informative and invaluable to students of psychology and related disciplines at all levels.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133865 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 728 pages

Review
The new edition of Coolican's book is impressively wide-ranging. It introduces quantitative and qualitative research methods and guides the reader through the research process from the initial identification and formulation of a research question to the preparation of the final report. The style of presentation is informal and appropriate for A'level students and those in the early years of a psychology degree. (The Psychologist )

"The new edition updates his support to lecturing on a wide range of approaches to psychological research, as specified for the undegraduate curriculum by the British Psychological Society (BPS) in recent years ... The book is replete with interesting and often important published examples."

(David Booth, Neuroimaging in Psychology )

About the Author
Hugh Coolican is Principal Lecturer in Psychology at Coventry University, a Chartered Psychologist and an assistant examiner for the International Baccalaureate.

---

Customer Reviews

EXCELLENT
I have had to read many books to understand statistics at University. This is an excellent book for those beginning stats, in fact the best I've ever bought. The tables can be a bit difficult to read, however, it is explained in such easy terms, and is very humourous and well-written. It really made sense of stats for me

Research methods and statistics in psychology
When this arrived I was lost on my first psychology report, the easy to follow instructions helped me through. I will continue to let it guide me and recommend it to all other psychology students.

Extensive, but a little annoying at times
This is a pretty good introduction to statistics, especially for complete beginners. I had to buy it for a course, and at first wasn't too impressed with it, primarily because of the writing style. The author keeps the tone very light and says many jokes and funny things, which never bothered me. What did irritate me was that he also has a tendency to really "dumb-down" everything, to the point where you feel like it has been written for younger students, rather than university students (which I gather it sort of was).

However, I figured out after working my way through the course that the text is actually pretty good: it covers several statistical tests that other texts skip. Tests detailed include: binomial sign test, Chi-square, Wilcoxon matched pairs signed ranks, Mann-Whitney U, Wilcoxon rank sum, t test, Pearson's correlation, Spearman's rho, regression (including multiple), Kruskal-Wallis, Jonkheere trend, Friedman, Page trend, ANOVA (one-way, two-way, more-than-two-way, unrelated and related), MANOVA, ANCOVA. It also covers the design of experiments in detail. And the author really does make an effort to explain everything fully, for readers who have neither a statistical background nor even a strong maths background. It serves as a really good reference, even if reading it is a bit painful.

In short, I doubt this is the best statistics book out there, but it is the best statistics reference book I've seen yet. So I would recommend it if you are starting from scratch. But if you are comfortable with maths or even basic statistics, I wouldn't bother this book, as I'm sure you'll find it as irritating to read as I did.