Making Sense of Statistics: A Conceptual Overview

This book aims to provide a "conceptual overview" of statistics. In that, it succeeds reasonably well, but its introduction to statistical thinking, in its attempt to be gentle to those who are unfamiliar with mathematics, ends up being too superficial to be practical for all but the most limited of audiences.If you have never before taken any course in statistics AND have little interest in actually performing any statistical calculations of your own, this might be a decent book for you. It will give you enough information to have a general idea of what researchers are talking about when they report their findings and readers in this category will find the lack of mathematical formulae throughout the book merciful. However, if you have even basic experience with statistics, it likely won't tell you much (if anything) new. More importantly, if you have any desire to ever compute a statistic of your own, you'll find this book unhelpful. All but the most elementary of formulae are confined to a brief appendix where mathematical expressions are presented without explanation. The result is that reading the body of the text provides no mathematics and reading the formulae provides no context, so the reader will struggle to connect the two. And even if the reader does successfully connect formula to concept, the book offers little by way of mathematical sophistication.Some would argue that, in the age of computerized calculation, it's more important to understand concepts than formulae anyway, and I agree in part. While rote memorization of mathematical expressions is probably not the best use of a student's time, no conceptual understanding of statistics can be complete without a deeper understanding of the mathematics operating below the surface. For that understanding, you'll have to seek out other books (personally, I like Chihara & Hesterberg's Mathematical Statistics for the more mathematically inclined, or Gravetter & Wallnau's Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences for the less mathematically inclined, though there are plenty of other options out there).Where this book shines is in its method of holding the reader's hand through explanations of some rather abstract concepts. It probably would have been stronger had it contained a greater variety of explanatory examples, but the reader is genuinely left with an understanding, however basic, of the reasoning behind a handful of the most common statistical techniques. On the other hand, as understanding statistics becomes increasingly important in public life, so does a careful understanding of some incredibly subtle points about interpreting statistics. While this book briefly touches on such topics the correct understanding of statistical significance and effect size, there is a world of subtler points that I think should have been covered. The reader ought to (but probably won't) come away from a book like this with a strong intuitive understanding of just what the p-value really means, for instance, and how it can be manipulated by the careless or unscrupulous researcher.Where does that leave this book? It's great for the non-researcher who wants to get just a bit deeper into understanding how statistics works without actually bothering to study the field, and it would probably make a welcome companion for the student struggling to understand the conceptual underpinnings of a first course in statistics, but it can't substitute for a more mathematical text for the practitioner and doesn't get quite deep enough into the conceptual subtleties for the armchair philosopher.

I referred to this book about 25% of the time. Only about 20% of us actually used the book in the class. The teacher explained that it was likely a lot more probable to use it more likely than we probably would. The likeliness of it probably happening was pretty high. There was a 3% margin of error.

Required for my bsn program. I loved it very explanatory and provides examples. Only theres no answers to sample questions at end of chapter or for chapter quizzes so you don't get the answer or rational if you are stumped (out of whole book only 2 questions stumped me). In combo with my research text was so helpful in learning to read a research paper and critical analyzing what was actually said. Definitely recommend.

I needed this book for class and it is really well written and makes understanding the basics os Statistics so much easier.

Required text for a course but will keep to to reference over the years.