READING STATISTICS AND RESEARCH

The book demonstrates the best and most conservative ways to decipher and critique research reports particularly for social science researchers. In addition, new editions of the book are always better organized, effectively structured and meticulously updated in line with the developments in the field of research statistics. Even the most trivial issues are revisited and updated in new editions. For instance, purchaser of the previous editions might check the interpretation of skewness and kurtosis indices in the third edition (p. 34) and in the fifth edition (p.29) to see how the author revisits every single detail. Theory and practice always go hand in hand in all editions of the book. Re-reading previous editions (e.g. third edition) before reading the fifth edition gives the impression that the author never stops ameliorating his instructional text writing methods. In brief, “Reading Statistics and Research” is among the best sources showing research consumers how to understand and critically assess the statistical information and research results contained in technical research reports. In this respect, the review written by Mirko Savić in Panoeconomicus (2008, 2, pp. 249-252) will help the readers to get a more detailed overview of each chapters. I cordially urge the beginning researchers to pick a highlighter to conduct a detailed reading with the book. A thorough reading of the source will make the researchers quite selective in appreciating the harmony between the data analysis, results and discussion sections of typical journal articles. If interested, beginning researchers might begin with this book to grasp the basics of research statistics, and prop up their critical research reading skills with some statistics package applications through the help of Dr. Andy Field’s book, Discovering Statistics using SPSS (second edition) published by Sage in 2005