SPSS for Psychologists: Fifth Edition

by Richard Kemp, Rosemary Snelgar, Nicola Brace, et al.

Book Overview

Combining comprehensive coverage with an accessible style, the new edition of this best-selling guide leads users step-by-step through the process of using IBM SPSS version 23 to analyze research... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1848726007
• ISBN13: 9781848726000
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A good working manual for non-math people

If you're working on an advanced degree or in the field of social sciences, you may need to use a software package such as SPSS to analyze the data of your studies. You don't need to be a statistician; you don't even need to be a "math person" but you do need to be able to make sense of your data. This book will help you do that. It discusses each statistical tool, how it works and when and why to use it. Then step by step it tells how to implement each tool in SPSS. Exercises are included to give you a feel for how it works. Although the title of this book says "for psychologists" this book would be appropriate for users in any social science field such as educational research, medical research, sociology, politics, law, management, etc. You'll be pleased with the powerful yet easily intuitive interface of SPSS, especially if you've been using other packages such as Excel. Some suggested improvements: an early chapter should be included with an overview of the various statistical tools and when and why to use them. Also, a data disk or a place online to download data files would be great. For what it's worth -- I have a master's degree in math education and I work as a mathematical assistant in university environment with adult learners at all levels from freshman to graduate students. I recently worked with an administrator working on his PhD, helped him through a statistics course for social science majors. He's one of those brilliant but non-mathematical folks who has managed to get along fine all his life without math and now all of a sudden he had to learn to do statistics. At first he felt pretty grim. However, through this book and the SPSS package he saw the value of statistics, became fluent in the use of SPSS, and is now making great progress on his dissertation.

A very handy and useful book

I wish I'd found this book earlier during my undergraduate years. SPSS for psychologists covers from the most basic topics to quite advanced (such as factor analysis and logistic regression). It is very easy to read, explains how to do various statistical operations in SPSS and how to interpret them. I came across a few errors, though, but they were minor and I highly recommend this book!

Good reference text for the non-statistician

Use of this book requires a basic knowledge of statistics and the tests you will be performing. Don't use a test if you don't know the theory behind it. What's great about the book is the no-nonsense explaination of default data analysis output tables. Every user of SPSS will eventually need to wade through these complete, but poorly organized tables.