MARTIN LEE ABBOTT, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Seattle Pacific University, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Washington School Research Center, an independent research and data analysis center funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has held positions in both academia and in industry, focusing his consulting and teaching in the areas of program evaluation, applied sociology, statistics, and research methods. Dr. Abbott is the author of The Program Evaluation Prism: Using Statistical Methods to Discover Patterns (Wiley).
<p>"0Utilizing the latest software, this book presents the essential statistical procedures for drawing valuable results from data in the social sciences.</p><p>Mobilizing interesting real-world examples from the field of education, Understanding Educational Statistics Using Microsoft Excel and SPSS supplies a seamless presentation that identifies valuable connections between statistical applications and research design. Class-tested to ensure an accessible presentation, the book combines clear, step-by-step explanations and the use of software packages that are accessible to both the novice and professional alike to present the fundamental statistical practices for organizing, understanding, and drawing conclusions from educational research data.</p><p>The book begines with an introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics and then proceeds to acquaint readers with the various functions for working with quantitative data in the Microsoft Excel environment, such as spreadsheet navigation; sorting and filtering; and creating pivot tables. Subsequent chapters treat the procedures that are commonly-employed when working with data across various fields of social science research."</p>
