Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics

This book was a portion of the required reading for a class on quantitative research. Though I have not read every page, I am finished with it (for the purposes of the class). As an initial caveat, I am not mathematically inclined. I did well in math as a primary/secondary school student, but my advanced studies have been in the social sciences (qualitatively) and liberal arts. Math, and especially statistics, have been beyond the scope of my thinking for some time.

All that is to say that I was intimidated by this (and the other) text for the class. Salkind, though, does an excellent job of describing statistical analysis in lay terms, and my statement extends beyond the sometimes snarky, fun language he chooses to use in this text. It is one thing to understand what a correlation coefficient is; quite another to understand how and why one would want to know what it is. Salkind does an admirable job and providing insight into the latter. The Microsoft Excel material in this text is also top notch. Very helpful indeed.

The one qualm I have with this text is that there appear to be a number of typos throughout. For example, I was able to find Data Set 3 for Chapter 5, yet only the column headings were listed, not the data. As such, I could not work through the practice problems referencing that data set. In full disclosure, we were required to utilize the third edition; perhaps some of these discrepancies have been tidied up in the fourth version.