A Layperson’S Guide to Understanding Research and Data Analysis

Book excerpt: This book is written for busy people who need to understand the information that is flooding them and find ways to interpret it. You may be a business executive, a medical doctor, a stay-at-home mother or father wanting to understand the Gallup poll results in the daily newspaper, or a student studying nursing, counseling, psychology, sociology, or even mathematics. Yet you need to quickly be brought into the world of research and data analysis. It does not require that you dedicate a year of your life to take a course in social-science research and quantitative data analysis. In fact, this book will not have formulas or require you to calculate mathematical functions. But you do need to have the dedication to try to understand what might be considered another language. You can do it at a pace that suits your lifestyle. You might want to take a look at the index at the end of the book to see if there are any terms youve been interested in or wondered about. It is very nontraditional in that its focus is on the concepts behind these processes rather than asking you to learn formulas and how to calculate data. If you have a desire to learn more about what is going on, there are many excellent texts in the references.