Quantitative Psychological Research

Book excerpt: Quantitative Psychological Research: The Complete Student's Companion, expertly guides the reader through all the stages involved in undertaking quantitative psychological research: designing a study, choosing a sample of people, undertaking the study, analysing the data, and reporting the research. Accessibly written and clearly presented, the book is designed for anyone learning to conduct quantitative psychological research as well being a reference work for professional psychologists. It covers the full research process, from the original idea to reporting the completed study, emphasizing the importance of looking beyond statistical significance in evaluating data. The book provides step-by-step guidance on choosing, interpreting and reporting the appropriate analysis, featuring worked examples and extended calculations as appendices for readers who wish to delve further. This edition features a new chapter examining ideas on how causality might be identified when data is not obtained from an experiment and has been thoroughly updated throughout to reflect latest research practices. Care has been taken to avoid tying the book to any specific statistical software, providing readers with a thorough grounding in the basics no matter which package they go on to use. This is a must read for professional psychologists as well as students and researchers of Psychology, Statistics and Research Methods. This book is also invaluable for anyone interested in conducting quantitative psychological research.