Easy Statistics in Psychology

Mark Forshaw is Principal Lecturer in Psychology at Staffordshire University. He is a Chartered Health Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He is the author of Your Undergraduate Psychology Project: A BPS Guide (BPS Blackwell, 2004).

"The book achieves a great deal in a short space, and I am sure many readers will find it extremely useful.... This is an unusual and generally well-written book that will be valuable for those who want their statistical understanding to come from words rather than numbers or mathematics." (Psychology Learning and Teaching, Autumn 2008)"This text speaks statistics in a psychologist's language. It avoids mathematical rigour and equations and eases the reader into the unfamiliar territory of statistical methodology with the more familiar map of a relaxed conversational style. This approach should be particularly appealing for people from a non-numerate background who are interested in exploring the potential of what statistics can do to help them understand their data."—Peter Watson, University of Cambridge"Many psychology students are scared of statistics. In Easy Statistics in Psychology, Mark Forshaw attempts to demystify the most common and useful statistics in psychology and make them accessible and perhaps even cuddly. Mark has taught statistics to many undergraduates and it shows, particularly in his use of helpful analogies and his insight into the common, but rarely discussed, errors students make in data entry and in interpretation of the complex output from statistical packages. This book nicely complements other more advanced or technical texts. Most psychology undergraduates will find it helpful; for some it may be a God send."—Derek Johnston, Professor in Psychology, University of Aberdeen

• Preface ixAcknowledgement xi1 An Introduction to Measuring Things 12 Variance and More 113 Probability, Power and Error 234 First Steps in Inferential Testing 435 Analysis of Variance 516 Correlation and Regression 717 Factor Analysis 758 Goodness of Fit and Chi-Squared 1019 Non-parametric Tests 11110 Rarely Used Tests in the Seedy Underbelly of Statistics 115References 125Further Reading 127Index 129