Book review - Doing data analysis wiith SPSS 10.0 by Robert H Carver and Jane G Nash

This book is aimed primarily at students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, who have to take an introductory course, or a service course in Statistics as part of their degree programme. Both authors have extensive experience of teaching such courses. Robert Carver is Professor of Business Administration and Jane Nash is Associate Professor of Psychology, both at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. One of the strengths of the book is that it uses real data throughout and, not surprisingly, many of these datasets are on problems of relevance to students in these two areas studying in the United States. There are however a number of datasets from other disciplines and some of non-American origin. A detailed description of the data sets is provided in an appendix at the end of the book, but the data sets themselves have to be downloaded from the Duxbury Press website. This was very easy and very quick to do since none of the data sets are unreasonably large…This book is aimed at students who need to do statistics as part of their degree; intended to supplement lectures etc and not a primary textbook. Ch 1-5 introduce features of SPSS, tables, graphs and descriptive stats. Ch 6-9 probability..., ch9-10 sampling.