Supplemental Material

In this edition I have made much use of the R programming language. Sometimes I provide the full coding, which includes reading in the data, transforming it to different forms, and doing the analysis. At other times I simply give the code for the specific analysis, assuming that you have already read in the data and done other preparatory work.

The Supplement section can be broken into three parts. The first part deals with obtaining and getting started with R and a companion editor RStudio. The second part includes R code for material in each chapter. Some of the code comes more or less directly from the chapter. Other code relates to the chapter but contains R commands with which you may not be familiar. I believe that you will be able to read through that code and have a general idea what it does even if you don't think that you could write it on your own. The nice thing about this material is that you can take what I have given, make changes, such as the names of variables or the form of a command, and apply it to other data. The third part contains material that I have found on the web or written myself that offers a good example, an extended discussion, or other things that will support your learning of this material.

Data Files

The files in this section 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 filenames may still refer to the 8th 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 also provide each data file in the SPSS format (which has the extension ".sav"). For files read into R it is straightforward to accommodate variable names. You simply add "header = TRUE" to the command that reads the data.

Student Manual

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 additional 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.

SeeingStatistics Applets

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.

 Errata

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. If you find an error, please feel free to let me know at David.Howell@uvm.edu.

Useful websites

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.

Java Applets

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.

Glossary

The glossary is a list of terms and their definitions. The definitions given in the book are ones that I wrote, but other people have written excellent glossaries and I point to theirs as well.

Additional Material

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.

PSPP Freeware Mimics SPSS

For those who want to try it, there is a set of freeware programs that are very similar tp SPSS, including the spelling of the name. I have spent very little time with PSPP, so I don't have a recommendation. But it does look a lot like SPSS in its menu system. It is available for Macs at Mac Version, for PCs at PC version, and for Linux at Linux version.

SPSS Manuals

• The Longer Manual
  
  

  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.

• The Shorter Manual
  
  

  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.

  
  

Arithmetic Review

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.

Publisher's Companion Site

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 recommend looking at it. Whenever I give the address of that site, it seems to move. I suggest doing an Internet search on Howell Companion Site Fundamental statistics. When I did that recently I found

"Book Companion Site
 www.cengagebrain.com/cgi-wadsworth/course_products_wp.pl?...

 Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, 8th Edition Chapter 1
 Flashcards. Glossary. Tutorial Quiz. Final Exam - Tutorial ... 

You want something like that.

One more word of advice

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. (Well, maybe Google is getting a bit pushy, but there are many other search sites.) 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.