Dr Helen Williams releases new book for students on statistics

Dr Helen Williams has released a new publication entitled Statistics for Politics and International Relations Using IBM Statistics (Sage). She gives an overview of the book:

"Many – probably even most – political science and international relations students do not embark on their degree knowing that they might have to undertake statistical analysis, and even fewer students react to finding this out with excitement. Yet statistics can be one of many fascinating ways to learn more about the world we live in, to examine how other people perceive the world, to measure the impact of moments of change on people’s worldview.

This book takes what some might consider to be a heretical approach to learning statistics. There are very few equations in the entire book, and those that appear are calculations that you can perform on the cheapest of non-scientific calculators; and these equations are generally only provided for students who want to take the next step with their results. Rather than inundating you with a completely disorientating environment that contains new software, new mathematics, and generic examples that you cannot easily assimilate, this book approaches learning statistics from the perspective of answering questions about the world.

Most chapters examine a small range of research questions, formulate hypotheses and test them against data. Many of the end-of-chapter activities are also based on this approach, walking you through the scientific research cycle of research question, theory, hypotheses and data to answer the question. Throughout, the approach is one focused on understanding what you have produced at a deep enough level that you understand how to transfer these ideas to other examples, contexts and datasets.

This book is designed for students with no background in statistics, SPSS or both. All of the examples are worked through by showing you how to test the data using the statistics software programme SPSS, but that does not make it inapplicable to students who are learning using other software packages, if you are looking for some additional explanation about what the numbers mean. The questions posed should relate to topics that you would encounter on a political science or international relations degree.

This book is different in three ways:

1. It focuses on applied statistics, not mathematics: it's about using numbers to understand the social world, not how to calculate them by hand.
2. It is one of very few books to focus on political science and international relations for all of the examples and specifically uses international datasets rather than the US American National Election Study.
3. It demonstrates how to use both point-and-click and syntax-based approaches in SPSS."