Burdess, N. (2010). Starting statistics: A short, clear, guide. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage. X, 187, £ 19.9
The book includes five parts. The first part is “measurement”, the second “standardization”, the
third “correlation”, the fourth “sampling and estimation” and the fifth “hypothesis testing.” The
book is a good one for those who would like to learn basic applied statistics in a simple and
understandable language. It is a clear guide to statistics and describes and explains statistical issues
in a plain language without using complicated mathematical formulations which is customary in such
books. There are already many books on statistics in the market oriented to social sciences; some
examples are Burns (2000), Guilford and Fruchter (1973; 1978), Hatch and Farhady (1982), Kirk
(1990) and Sprinthall (1987). However, Starting Statistics follows a new approach to simplify
complicated statistical concepts. The five parts in the book are organized around two simple but
important types of information—categorical and numerical which represent the levels of
measurement. All five parts of the book follow the same outline breaking down the general themes
into specific chapters. The first chapter in each part introduces the topic and the next chapters relate
and describe the topic in terms of categories and numbers. Different chapters in different sections
also follow the same pattern with an “overview” section briefly outlining the major parts of the
chapter followed by explanation of the topic with useful and understandable tables. An interesting
section in each chapter is “Behind the Stats” box which uses real-life stories and excerpts from
reliable sources to convey a statistical issue in a very direct way. While I found the whole book very
user-friendly in teaching statistical concepts, chapter 11 is especially interesting as it provides an
overview of how to estimate population mean based on a sample mean. Part five of the book,
hypothesis testing, should also be very interesting to those who would like to use quantitative
research methods to test hypotheses. This final section of the book is particularly important as
“hypothesis testing” is a technical and controversial issue in research sometimes wrongly
conceptualized and used even by some experienced researchers. The final part of the book clarifies
what a hypothesis is and how a quantitative research design should plan for testing hypotheses. One
drawback of the book is, however, that there no exercises at the end of the chapters. This is a real
deficiency of the book especially because the author considers one of the functions of the book to
be used as a set textbook for stat classes. To fulfill this pedagogical functionality students and
teachers certainly expect some sorts of exercises and pedagogical tasks at the end of each chapter to
consolidate the topic discussed in the chapter. I hope the author complement the book with
necessary exercises in subsequent editions.
References:
Burns, R. (2000). Introduction to Research Methods, 4th edition, Longman.
Guilford, J.P. & Fruchter, B. (1973, 1978). Fundamental Statistics in Psychology and Education (6th
ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
Hatch, E. & Farhady, H. (1982). Research Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. Rowley,
Massachusetts: Newbury House.
Kirk, R.E. (1990). Statistics: An Introduction (3rd edition). Orlando, FL: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
Inc.
Sprinthall, R.C. (1987). Basic Statistical Analysis. 2nd edition. Englewood, Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
INC.
Reviewed by:
Mehdi Riazi
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Australia