Applied Data Analysis in Psychology: Exploring Diversity with Statistics

Applied Data Analysis in Psychology: Exploring Diversity with Statistics contextualizes statistical concepts and tests within current, or recently published, research. Often, novice statistics students have difficulty applying the course concepts beyond the classroom. This publication bridges that gap between classroom and both statistical application and research consumption, both of which are central for the social sciences.

The manual meaningfully and purposefully integrates and highlight diversity research. The chosen examples highlight research questions that relate to various topics of diversity (e.g., age, race, gender, income, sexual orientation, national culture, religion). While this might seem like capitalization of current “hot-topic” issues that are on the minds many students, this is not a passing phase in Psychology. All the members of this collaborative project include a focus on diversity in their teaching and research. Further, diversity and inclusion are central components of the mission of the American Psychological Association.

Finally, the material is affordable and that also exposed students to open-access, freely available, resources. With this goal in mind, the authors have used data that is publicly available through open-access databases for almost all of our chapter examples. The authors have also made an effort to incorporate many articles that are published in open-access journals. For the primary instruction tool, the authors introduce students to JASP, a freely available statistical analysis tool that is both user-friendly and comprehensive for covering all of the basic analyses used in psychological research. However, the authors also wanted this manual to be flexible enough to accommodate instructors and students who are interested in additional statistical software programs; thus, resources are also provided using Excel, SPSS, and R.