This website supports Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, 6th edition by David C. Howell, which will be published in 2007. These pages are intended to provide data that are referenced in examples and exercises, answers to exercises (some of them), a set of Java applets that illustrate concepts in the book, guides to the use of SPSS, and other material that you may find useful. In addition, I have tried to incorporate important material on topics that I don't discuss in the text, and helpful hints about where to find useful information on the web.
These files contain the data from most of
the examples and exercises in
the book. The first line of each file contains the variable names.
Instruct your software to treat that line as variable names. In SPSS
this is done simply by clicking the appropriate button on the second
dialog box. These are ASCII files, and can be imported quite easily
into any statistical software.
I have provided fairly complete answers to odd numbered questions. Where questions ask you to think of an example of something, or verify that your results are the same as the results obtained by software, I generally do not provide answers because there is little to provide. Students often complain that I don't provide them to the even numbered questions as well, but many instructors do not want all of the answers available.
This link will take you to a set of Java applets written by Gary McClelland. They illustrate a wide variety of statistical phenomena and are well worth your experimentation. This link will take you to a page that then links to all of the applets.
Much as I try, assisted by copy editors
and proofreaders, errors always find a way of sneaking in. When I find
those, or when they are pointed out to me, I add an entry on the
errata sheet and try to give credit where it is due.
is a surprising amount of material
available over the internet, and much of it can make the teaching and
learning of statistics easier. I have provided links to those websites
that I think are particularly useful. However links go bad for reasons
completely beyond my control (e.g., the author changes the server on
which her pages are posted) and you may get error messages. The easiest
thing to do is to try to recover the material by dropping off the last
bit of each URL and seeing if that gets you anywhere.
A Java applet is a program that can be
included in an HTML
document and run over the web. There are many of them out there, and
they are useful to illustrate important concepts, to serve as
statistical calculators for statistical functions, and to simply run
analyses. I have links to several of these on the applet page.
The glossary is a list of terms and their definitions. The main one that I point to is one that I wrote, but many other people have written them and I point to theirs as well.
I often am asked questions that stimulate me to go further into a topic and to write a page (sometimes a very long one) discussing that topic. For example, the intraclass correlation coefficient is an important statistic that I did not have space to discuss in the text. There is a link to a discussion that I wrote about that statistic. These pages were mostly written at a more advanced level than the Fundamentals book, but I am leaving them available for anyone who would like them.
Some time ago Esther Leerkes, now at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and I wrote a manual on using SPSS. (Actually Eshter did all the hard stuff, and I made suggestions as she went along.) SPSS is the most commonly available software for statistical analyses, and is easy to use. But we were asked if we could put together an introductory manual. That manual can be found at the above link. It refers to a slightly earlier version of SPSS, but that should make no difference to your use of it.
At some other time I wrote another
manual (I no longer
recall why) that is a bit more fun to read, but is not as long. This
one is called the Shorter Manual for lack of imagination. You can load
it at the link above.
I have written a review of basic arithmetic to accompany a more introductory book that I read. I am always surprised how often people forget some of the most basic material--myself included. You may well know everything in this review, but if you don't, or knew it but don't remember it now, the review should be helpful.
I can't resist adding what is perhaps the best advice I have. If there is something that you don't understand, just remember that "Google is your friend." She certainly is mine. If you don't understand what Fisher's Exact Test is, or you don't like my explanation, go to Google and type in Fisher's Exact Test. I just did that and had 260,000 hits. You can't tell me that there isn't going to be something useful in there.
dch