Short description:

This bestselling text provides students with the most readable and comprehensive survey of research methods, statistical concepts and procedures in psychology today.

Long description:

Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology provides students with the most readable and comprehensive survey of research methods, statistical concepts and procedures in psychology today. Assuming no prior knowledge, this bestselling text takes you through every stage of your research project, giving advice on planning and conducting studies, analysing data and writing up reports, both quantitative and qualitative. It incorporates diversity and includes a large section on cross-cultural psychology methods and issues.

The book continues its long tradition of integrating qualitative issues into methods chapters as well as providing two chapters dedicated to qualitative methods. It provides clear coverage of experimental, interviewing and observational methods; psychological testing; and statistical procedures which include nominal-level tests, ordinal and interval two-condition tests, simple and multi-factorial ANOVA designs, correlation, multiple regression, log linear analysis, factor analysis and, new with this edition, logistic regression. It features detailed and illustrated SPSS instructions for all these and other procedures, eliminating the need for an extra SPSS textbook.

New edition features include:

• Logistic regression


• Greater detail of online research methods


• Expanded coverage of report writing guidelines


• Concepts illustrated with up-to-date published research examples


• Instructor and Student Resource website signposted throughout the book to improve student usability

Each chapter contains a glossary, key terms and newly integrated exercises, ensuring that key concepts are understood.

This book is extended and enhanced by a fully updated and refreshed Instructor and Student Resource website, which includes:

• A collection of interactive multiple-choice questions with detailed feedback, providing the opportunity to test understanding at different levels


• Practical exercises that give students the opportunity to put their learning into practice


• Links to further reading and sources to expand knowledge


• Test banks for each chapter to save instructors time

Access the website at: www.routledge.com/cw/coolican.

Table of Contents:

Preface, Acknowledgements, Part 1. Research methods and ethics, 1. Psychology, science and research, 2. Measuring people ? variables, samples and the qualitative critique, 3. Experiments and experimental designs in psychology, 4. Validity in psychological research, 5. Quasi-experiments and non-experiments, 6. Observational methods ? watching and being with people, 7. Interview methods ? asking people direct questions, 8. Psychological tests and measurement scales, 9. Comparison studies ? cross-sectional, longitudinal and cross-cultural studies, 10. Qualitative approaches in psychology, 11. Ethical issues in psychological research, Part 2. Analysing data and writing reports, 12. Analysing qualitative data, 13. Statistics ? organising the data, 14. Graphical representation of data, 15. Frequencies and distributions, 16. Significance testing ? was it a real effect?, 17. Testing for differences between two samples, 18. Tests for categorical variables and frequency tables, 19. Correlation, 20. Regression methods, 21. Factor analysis, 22. Multi-level analysis ? differences between more than two conditions (ANOVA), 23. Multi-factorial ANOVA designs, 24. ANOVA for repeated measures designs, 25. Choosing a significance test for your data, 26. Planning your practical and writing up your report, Appendix, References, Index