This website supports Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, 8th edition by David C. Howell, which will be published in 2013. 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 two freely downloadable packages that do much of what SPSS will do. I also have 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 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. (If you stumble upon this cite before the book comes out, the file names may still refer to the 7th edition.) The first line of each file contains the names of each variable.
Instruct your software to treat that line accordingly. In SPSS
this is done simply by clicking the appropriate button on the second
dialog box. These are tab-delimited ASCII files, which means that columns of numbers are separated by tabs. These can be imported quite easily into any statistical software. I will also provide each data file in the SPSS format (which has the extension ".sav,)" however these files will not be available until I get them created.
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 often 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. The material presented in boxes was originally designed for instructors, and often reads that way. However in this edition many of these comments will be helpful to students as well, so I have included them.
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.
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.
There 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. Alternatively, copy
only the title of the page and search under that.
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 definitions given here are ones that I wrote, but other people have written excellent glossaries and I point to theirs as well.
Some time ago Esther Leerkes, now at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and I wrote a manual on using SPSS. (Actually Esther 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 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, and is not as long. This
one is called the Shorter Manual for lack of imagination. You can download
it at the link above.
MYSTAT is a version of a larger program called SYSTAT that is available free to students. It is relatively easy to use, and I recommend trying it out. You need to register, but it is free.
LazStats is a free program written by Bill Miller at Iowa State. It is written in Lazarus, which is a variant of Pascal, and that is where its name comes from. I also have a page on downloading this program and how to use it. I strongly urge you to use one or the other of these two programs. MYSTAT is not available for the Mac as far as I know, but there is an OSX version of LazStats.
I have written a review of basic arithmetic for those who would find it useful. 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.
The publisher maintains a companion site for this book. It contains sample test questions, flashcards, and other material for each chapter. (There is a box in which you can select a chapter.)
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