Using and Interpreting Statistics in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences is designed to be paired with any undergraduate introduction to research methods text used by students in a variety of disciplines. It introduces students to statistics at the conceptual level―examining the meaning of statistics, and why researchers use a particular statistical technique, rather than computational skills. Focusing on descriptive statistics, and some more advanced topics such as tests of significance, measures of association, and regression analysis, this brief, inexpensive text is the perfect companion to help students who have not yet taken an introductory statistics course or are confused by the statistics used in the articles they are reading.
William E. Wagner, III, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Sociology at California State University, Dominguez Hills and Executive Director of the Social Science Research & Instructional Council of the CSU. He is co-author of Adventures in Social Research, 11th edition (SAGE, 2022), The Practice of Survey Research (SAGE, 2016), and A Guide to R for Social and Behavioral Sciences (SAGE, 2020) and author of Using IBM® SPSS® Statistics for Research Methods and Social Science Statistics, 7th edition (SAGE, 2019).
Brian Joseph Gillespie, Ph.D. is a researcher in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is the author of Household Mobility in America: Patterns, Processes, and Outcomes (Palgrave, 2017) and coauthor of The Practice of Survey Research: Theory and Applications (Sage, 2016) and Using and Interpreting Statistics in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences (Sage, 2018). He has also published research in a variety of social science journals on topics related to family, migration, the life course, and interpersonal relationships.