Publisher's Synopsis
Designed to meet a universal need in statistical instruction, this book teaches basic statistical principles through their application to real data. The data sets are chosen from fields that all students can relate to, such as marketing, industrial safety, anthropology, psychology, banking, biology, linguistics, public health, geography, physics, sports, geology and medicine. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on how statistical ideas and methods can be used to illuminate the data, rather than on how the data can be used to illustrate particular statistical methods. Some of the basic statistical methods that prove to be useful include: graphical displays, confidence intervals, one and two-sample t-tests, chi-squared analyses of contingency tables, simple and multiple linear regression, correlation, one-way ANOVAs, and block designs. For each data set, students are first guided through some basic procedures, usually using Minitab 12 software. They are then invited to explore the data more extensively on their own, with answers and possible approaches.
