Statistics are part of our everyday life: from polling and elections to advertising claims, we confront numerical claims all the time. Rather than being swayed by bad arguments and questionable correlations, this book introduces you to the most common and contemporary statistical methods so that you can better understand the world. This is the most accessible guide to using statistics in Politics and IR research. Praised for being intuitive and engaging, this textbook walks you through the most common tools - from crosstabs to correlations; from multiple to logistic regression - in a way that couldn't be more different than dull number crunching or complicated techniques. Instead, it empowers you to decide the best means to analyse a problem. Fully updated and revised throughout, this new edition is accompanied by four workbooks that provide both practical and theoretical examples using different statistical software: SPSS, Stata, R, and Python. Simply choose the relevant workbook and learn how to do your own statistical analysis with the included activities, screenshots and step-by-step instructions. This text is essential for anyone looking to become proficient in statistics: whether that's to gain statistical literacy, to complete your thesis, to boost your value on the job market, or to become an active and informed consumer of current affairs. Why let other people explain the world to you? Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy.
Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna (Italy). He is also co-founder of the Center for Research and Social Progress. He has taught quantitative methods to undergraduate and graduate students since 2003. He has held academic positions in the United States (Georgetown University; University of Mississippi), the United Kingdom (Nuffield Fellow, Oxford; University of Kent), and Italy (Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute, Florence; University of Bologna) in addition to visiting positions at Sciences Po - Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble (France), the University of Georgia (USA); Davison College (USA); St. Antony's College (Oxford, UK); Mannheimer Zentrum fuer Europaeische Sozialforschung: (Germany), and the University of Debrecen (Hungary). His research interests include in the field of Political Behavior in Europe, particularly as it relates to how individuals perceive and make sense of politics (recent examples focusing on political attitudes include International Political Science Review, Political Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy). Recent publications also include co-authored work that incorporate party competition with recent publications in Government and Opposition, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Common Market Studies. He lives with his family in Italy.
Chapter 1: The Scientific Method and Statistics Chapter 2: Theory and Hypotheses Chapter 3: Data and Variables Chapter 4: Research Design and the Scientific Study of Politics Chapter 5: The Ethics of Data Analysis PART I Descriptive Statistics Chapter 6: Univariate Descriptive Statistics Chapter 7: Measures of Association I: Nominal- and Ordinal-level Variables Chapter 8: Measures of Association II: Means Comparison and Correlation Chapter 9: Measures of Association III: (Bivariate) Regression PART II Inferential Statistics Chapter 10: An Introduction to Interference Chapter 11: Inference for Nominal- and Ordinal-level Variables Chapter 12: The Central Limit Theorem Chapter 13: Inference for Interval-level Variables PART III Multiple Regression Chapter 14: Multiple Regression Chapter 15: Extensions to Multiple Regression Chapter 16: Issues with Multiple Regression Chapter 17: Binary Logistic Regression Chapter 18: Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables Epilogue
