Description
Book SynopsisDo statistics-heavy research papers give you a headache? Are you baffled by bias, confused by correlation, or flummoxed by F-tests? A Guide for the Statistically Perplexed is here to help! This book is designed to assist students, clinicians, and researchers in becoming familiar with statistical and research techniques by covering the essentials of the topic and drawing attention to many common problem areas.
Inspired to write on this topic in reaction to mistakes he encountered in actual papers, David L. Streiner uses his trademark sense of humour and light-hearted style to explain complex statistical concepts in lucid, jargon-free language. Streiner delves into topics such as presenting data (or, conversely, how not to), statistical techniques, and more advanced procedures. To help readers detect problems with research design and interpretation, he details important ‘CRAP’ (convoluted reasoning or anti-intellectual pomposity) detectors for which
Trade Review
'An easy to read collection of excellent tutorials on selected areas of statistics, measurement, and to a lesser extent, research methods... I can recommend this volume without hesitation.' -- Ryan J. Van Lieshout Archives of Women's Mental Health - June 2013
Table of Contents
Introduction Acknowledgements PART 1: INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS 1. Do You See What I Mean? Indices of Central Tendency 2. Maintaining Standards: Differences Between the Standard Deviation and Standard Error, and When to Use Each 3. Breaking Up is Hard to Do: The Heartbreak of Dichotomizing Continuous Data 4. Pick a Number: Sample Size and Power in Psychiatric Research 5. Speaking Graphically: An Introduction to Some Newer Graphing Techniques 6. Let Me Count the Ways: Measuring Incidences, Prevalence, and Impact in Epidemiological Studies 7. Risky Business: Making Sense of Estimates of Risk PART 2: MORE ADVANCED STATISTICS 8. The Case of the Missing Data: Methods of Dealing with Dropouts and Other Research Vagaries 9. An Introduction to Multivariate Statistics 10. Figuring Out Factors: The Use and Misuse of Factor Analysis 11. Regression in the Service of the Superego: The Do's and Don'ts of Stepwise Multiple Regression 12. Regression Toward the Mean: Its Etiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment 13. Stayin' Alive: An Introduction to Survival Analysis 14. Life After Chi-Squared: An Introduction to Log-Linear Analysis 15. Confronting the Confounders: The Meaning, Detection, and Handling of Confounders in Research 16. Finding Our Way: An Introduction to Path Analysis 17. Building a Better Model: An Introduction to Structural Equation Modelling 18. Unicorns Do Exist: A Tutorial on "Proving" the Null Hypothesis PART 3: RESEARCH METHODS 19. Reconcilable Differences: The Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods 20. Thinking Small: Research Designs Appropriate for Clinical Practice 21. The Two "Es" of Research: Efficacy and Effectiveness Trials PART 4: MEASUREMENT 22. A Checklist for Evaluating the Usefulness of Rating Scales 23. Learning How to Differ: Agreement and Reliability Statistics 24. What's Under the ROC? An Introduction to Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves 25. Measure for Measure: New Developments in Measurement and Item Response Theory PART 5: MISCELLANEOUS 26. Putting it All Together: Using Meta-Analysis in Psychiatric Research 27. "While You're Up, Get Me a Grant": A Guide to Grant Writing 28. A Shortcut to Rejection: How Not to Write the Results Section of a Paper INDEX
