This book focuses on experimental research in two disciplines that have a lot of common ground in terms of theory, experimental designs used, and methods for the analysis of experimental research data: education and psychology. Although the methods covered in this book are also frequently used in many other disciplines, including sociology and medicine, the examples in this book come from contemporary research topics in education and psychology. Various statistical packages, commercial and zero-cost Open Source ones, are used.

The goal of this book is neither to cover all possible statistical methods out there nor to focus on a particular statistical software package. There are many excellent statistics textbooks on the market that present both basic and advanced concepts at an introductory level and/or provide a very detailed overview of options in a particular statistical software programme. This is not yet another book in that genre.

Core theme of this bookis a heuristic called the question-design-analysis bridge: there is a bridge connecting research questions and hypotheses, experimental design and sampling procedures, and common statistical methods in that context. Each statistical method is discussed in a concrete context of a set of research question with directed (one-sided) or undirected (two-sided) hypotheses and an experimental setup in line with these questions and hypotheses. Therefore, the titles of the chapters in this book do not include any names of statistical methods such as 'analysis of variance' or 'analysis of covariance'. In a total of seventeen chapters, this book covers a wide range of topics of research questions that call for experimental designs and statistical methods, fairly basic or more advanced.

Inhalt

PART I: COMMON QUESTIONS.- Chapter 1: The Question-Design-Analysis Bridge.- Chapter 2: Statistical Testing and Estimation.- Chapter 3: Measurement and Quality Criteria.- Chapter 4: Dealing with Missing Data.- PART II: TYPES OF OUTCOME VARIABLES.- Chapter 5: Dichotomous Outcome Variables.- Chapter 6: Multicategory Nominal Outcome Variables.- Chapter 7: Ordinal Outcome Variables.- Chapter 8: Quantitative Outcome Variables.- PART III: TYPES OF COMPARISONS.- Chapter 9: Common Approaches to Multiple Testing.- Chapter 10: Directed Hypotheses and Planned Comparisons.- Chapter 11: Two-Way and Three-Way Factorial Designs.- Chapter 12: Factor-Covariate Combinations.- PART IV: MULTILEVEL DESIGNS.- Chapter 13: Interaction Between Participants.- Chapter 14: Two or More Raters.- Chapter 15: Group-by-Time Interactions.- Chapter 16: Models for Treatment Order Effects.