Including many interesting example analyses and interpretations, along with exercises, this text offers a practical introduction to multiple regression. Each dataset used for the examples and exercises is small enough for readers to easily grasp the entire dataset and its analysis with respect to the specific statistical techniques covered. SPSS, Stata, SAS, and R code and commands for each type of analysis or recoding of variables in the book are available on an accompanying website, along with solutions to the exercises (on the instructor site).
Correlation matrices (along with their unstandardized counterparts, covariance matrices) underlie the majority the statistical methods that researchers use today. A correlation matrix is more than a matrix filled with correlation coefficients. The value of one correlation in the matrix puts constraints on the values of the others, and the multivariate implications of this statement is a major theme of the volume. Alexandria Hadd and Joseph Lee Rodgers cover many features of correlations matrices including statistical hypothesis tests, their role in factor analysis and structural equation modeling, and graphical approaches. They illustrate the discussion with a wide range of lively examples including correlations between intelligence measured at different ages through adolescence; correlations between country characteristics such as public health expenditures, health life expectancy, and adult mortality; correlations between well-being and state-level vital statistics; correlations between the racial composition of cities and professional sports teams; and correlations between childbearing intentions and childbearing outcomes over the reproductive life course. This volume may be used effectively across a number of disciplines in both undergraduate and graduate statistics classrooms, and also in the research laboratory.
Why Aren't You Writing?: Research, Real Talk, Strategies, & Shenanigans describes research on how bright and otherwise fairly normal people lose their minds when it comes to writing, and then shows the reader how to stop being one of those people. Author Sharon Zumbrunn designed this brief text for new academics and graduate students so they can understand the psychological hang-ups that can get in the way of writing productivity.
Engaging and thoroughly updated, this text provides a global perspective on the use and regulation of legal and illegal drugs. It examines drug policies in terms of their scope, goals, and effectiveness, as well as the effects of drugs, the patterns and correlates of use, and theories of the causes of drug use.
This book introduces current perspectives on Rasch measurement theory with an emphasis on developing Rasch-based scales. Rasch measurement theory represents a paradigm shift in measurement theory away from classical test theory and creates a framework for scaling that can yield invariant measurement. Rasch Models for Solving Measurement Problems: Invariant Measurement in the Social Sciences is a broadly accessible text. Authors George Engelhard Jr and Jue Wang introduce Rasch measurement theory step by step, with chapters on scale construction, evaluation, maintenance, and use. Points are illustrated and techniques are demonstrated through an extended example: The Food Insecurity Experience (FIE) Scale. The Rasch analyses in the book are run using the Facets computer program. Facets syntax, and R code for the ERMA program created by the authors to obtain parameter estimates and to examine model-data fit, together with sample data sets are all available on a website for the book.
Families & Change: Coping With Stressful Events and Transitions presents current literature detailing families' responses to varied transitions and stressful life events over the life span.
How can an undergraduate college education prepare learners to cope with the current COVID-19 pandemic? This collection of short essays, written by experts in 25 academic fields of study, addresses this very question. Each chapter brings perspective and insight from that discipline, presenting one useful idea and a recommended course of action. This one-of-a-kind resource is ideal for students, instructors, and administrators, particularly during the 2020-2021-academic year when institutions are challenged to continue their educational missions in the midst of a public health crisis that affects every aspect of college life.
The Practice of Evaluation: Partnership Approaches for Community Change provides foundational content on evaluation concepts, approaches, and methods, as well as applied, practical examples, with an emphasis on the use of evaluation and partnership approaches to effect change.
This book presents methods for describing and analyzing dependency and irregularity in long time series. Irregularity refers to cycles that are similar in appearance, but unlike seasonal patterns more familiar to social scientists, repeated over a time scale that is not fixed. Until now, the application of these methods has mainly involved analysis of dynamical systems outside of the social sciences, but this volume makes it possible for social scientists to explore and document fractal patterns in dynamical social systems.
