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Statistics for Politics and International Relations Using IBM SPSS Statistics
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Statistics for Politics and International Relations Using IBM SPSS Statistics

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February 2020 | 408 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

Guiding you from first principles to advanced techniques, this book uses IBM SPSS Statistics examples specific to your Politics and International Relations studies to equip you with the tools to understand key concepts in quantitative research, and use them to produce and interpret data. The book takes you through the entire research process, from choosing a research question through to writing up your findings.

Key features include:

  • Software-specific sections in each chapter to show you how to use SPSS, while mathematical equations are kept to a minimum
  • Packed with real life examples
  • Extensive learning features including: chapter objectives, boxed summaries, illustrations, exercises and end-of-chapter questions, suggestions of further reading and a glossary 
  • Accompanied by a collection of online resources including datasets, exercises, multiple choice questions, podcasts, videos and further reading and weblinks.

This is an invaluable research companion for students of Politics and International Relations using IBM SPSS Statistics.

 
Chapter 1: Introduction
 
Chapter 2: Approaches to the social world
 
Chapter 3: Getting started with SPSS
 
Chapter 4: Describing Categorical Data
 
Chapter 5: Visualizing categorical data
 
Chapter 6: Inference with categorical data
 
Chapter 7: Describing continuous data
 
Chapter 8: Visualizing continuous data
 
Chapter 9: Comparing group means
 
Chapter 10: Inference with continuous data
 
Chapter 11: Writing about data
 
Appendix: Activity answers

Dr Williams’ book is an excellent and scary-free introduction to statistics. Using engaging examples from politics and international relations help to illustrate difficult, abstract concepts, making learning statistics fun and approachable. A must-read for all politics undergraduate students!

 

Anja Neundorf, Professor of Politics and Research Methods, University of Glasgow. 

Anja Neundorf
Professor of Politics and Research Methods, University of Glasgow.

This book boldly outlines existing issues with the teaching statistical analysis to scholars of Politics and International Relations who often lack formal Maths and statistics training and, therefore, are rarely at ease with methodologically heavy ways of teaching statistics and quantitative data analysis. Instead, this book offers an application-based approach to teaching quantitative data analysis that is meant to inspire, as well as educate scholars with little to no background in statistical analysis.

By using relevant Politics and IR examples from a range of reliable data sources and exploring them using simple and robust data analysis techniques, this book makes statistical analysis accessible to a wide range of scholars and encourages their independent learning by offering a range of activities and additional resources for every chapter.

Dr Ekaterina Kolpinskaya is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter.

Dr Ekaterina Kolpinskaya
Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter

Sample Materials & Chapters

Chapter 3 - Getting Started with SPSS


Helen M. Williams

Helen Williams is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and IR at the University of Nottingham. She is passionate about teaching research methods and applied statistics to reluctant undergraduates. Her innovations in making quantitative research more accessible won the Political Studies Association Innovation in Teaching Politics Award in 2014. More About Author