John M. Gottman – författare

Divorce rates are at an all-time high. But without a theoretical understanding of the processes related to marital stability and dissolution, it is difficult to design and evaluate new marriage interventions. The Mathematics of Marriage provides the foundation for a scientific theory of marital relations. The book does not rely on metaphors, but develops and applies a mathematical model using difference equations. The work is the fulfillment of the goal to build a mathematical framework for the general system theory of families first suggested by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1960s.The book also presents a complete introduction to the mathematics involved in theory building and testing, and details the development of experiments and models. In one "marriage experiment," for example, the authors explored the effects of lowering or raising a couple''s heart rates. Armed with their mathematical model, they were able to do real experiments to determine which processes were affected by their interventions.

Applying ideas such as phase space, null clines, influence functions, inertia, and uninfluenced and influenced stable steady states (attractors), the authors show how other researchers can use the methods to weigh their own data with positive and negative weights. While the focus is on modeling marriage, the techniques can be applied to other types of psychological phenomena as well.

Hailed as a landmark in the development of experimental methods when it appeared in 1975, Design and Analysis of Time-Series Experiments is available again after several years of being out of print.

Gene V Glass, Victor L. Willson and John M. Gottman have carried forward the design and analysis of perhaps the most powerful and useful quasi-experimental design identified by their mentors in the classic Campbell & Stanley text Experimental and Quasi-experimental Design for Research (1966). In an era when governments seek to resolve questions of experimental validity by fiat and the label ''Scientifically Based Research'' is appropriated for only certain privileged experimental designs, nothing could be more appropriate than to bring back the classic text that challenges doctrinaire opinions of proper causal analysis.

Glass, Willson & Gottman introduce and illustrate an armamentarium of interrupted time-series experimental designs that offer some of the most powerful tools for discovering and validating causal relationships in social and education policy analysis. Drawing on the ground-breaking statistical analytic tools of Box & Jenkins, the authors extend the comprehensive autoregressive-integrated-moving-averages (ARIMA) model to accommodate significance testing and estimation of the effects of interventions into real world time-series. Designs and full statistical analyses are richly illustrated with actual examples from education, behavioral psychology, and sociology.