Quantitative Psychological Research: The Complete Student's Companion expertly guides the reader through all the stages involved in undertaking quantitative psychological research: designing a study, choosing a sample of people, undertaking the study, analysing the data, and reporting the research.
Accessibly written and clearly presented, the book is designed for anyone learning to conduct quantitative psychological research. It covers the full research process, from the original idea to reporting the completed study, emphasising the importance of looking beyond statistical significance in evaluating data. The book provides step-by-step guidance on choosing, interpreting and reporting the appropriate analysis, featuring worked examples and extended calculations as appendices for advanced readers.
This edition features new chapters on exploratory factor analysis, logistic regression and Bayesian statistics, and has been thoroughly updated throughout to reflect the latest research practices. Care has been taken to avoid tying the book to any specific statistical software, providing readers with a thorough grounding in the basics no matter which package they go on to use.
Whether you're at the beginning of your undergraduate degree or working towards your masters or doctorate, this book will be invaluable for anyone looking to understand how to conduct quantitative psychological research.
Contents
Detailed contents of chapters
Preface
Part 1
Introduction
1 The methods used in psychological research
Part 2
Choice of topic, measures and research design
2 The preliminary stages of research
3 Variables and the validity of research designs
4 Research designs and their internal validity
Part 3
Methods
5 Asking questions I: interviews and surveys
6 Asking questions II: measuring attitudes and meaning
7 Observation and content analysis
Part 4
Data and analysis
8 Scales of measurement
9 Summarising and describing data
10 Going beyond description
11 Samples and populations
12 Analysis of differences between a single sample and a population
13 Effect size and power
14 Parametric and non-parametric tests
15 Analysis of differences between two levels of an independent variable
16 Preliminary analysis of designs with one independent variable with
more than two levels
17 Analysis of designs with more than one independent variable
18 Subsequent analysis after ANOVA or ?2
19 Analysis of relationships I: correlation
20 Analysis of relationships II: linear regression
21 Analysis of relationships III: logistic regression
22 Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA)
23 Screening data
24 Exploratory factor analysis (EFA)
25 Multivariate analysis
26 Meta-analysis
27 Bayesian statistics
Part 5
Sharing the results
28 Reporting research
Appendixes
I. Descriptive statistics
(linked to Chapter 9)
II. Sampling and confidence intervals for proportions
(linked to Chapter 11)
III. Comparing a sample with a population
(linked to Chapter 12)
IV. The power of a one-group z-test
(linked to Chapter 13)
V. Data transformation and goodness-of-fit tests
(linked to Chapter 14)
VI. Seeking differences between two levels of an independent variable
(linked to Chapter 15)
VII. Seeking differences between more than two levels of an independent variable (linked to Chapter 16)
VIII. Analysis of designs with more than one independent variable
(linked to Chapter 17)
IX. Subsequent analysis after ANOVA or ?2
(linked to Chapter 18)
X. Correlation and reliability
(linked to Chapter 19)
XI. Linear regression
(linked to Chapter 20)
XII. Logistic regression
(linked to Chapter 21)
XIII. ANCOVA
(linked to Chapter 22)
XIV. Evaluation of measures: item and discriminative analysis, and accuracy of tests
(linked to Chapter 6)
XV. Exploratory Factor Analysis
(linked to Chapter 24)
XVI. Meta-analysis
(linked to Chapter 26)
XVII. Probability tables
XVIII. Power tables
XIX. Miscellaneous tables
References
Glossary of symbols
Author index
Subject index
