Beyond Basic Statistics (eBook)

Kristin H. Jarman, PhD, is Senior Research Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, where she applies basic and not-so-basic statistical analyses to her own set of research challenges. With over 20 years of experience, she has successfully presented results to those with little or no mathematical sophistication. Dr. Jarman is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles as well as The Art of Data Analysis: How to Answer Almost Any Question Using Basic Statistics, also published by Wiley.

Preface ix

1 Introduction: It Seemed like the Right Thing to Do at the Time 1

2 The Type A Diet: Sampling Strategies to Eliminate Confounding and Reduce Your Waistline 9

3 Conservatives, Liberals, and Other Political Pawns: How to Gain Power and Influence with Sample Size Calculations 31

4 Bunco, Bricks, and Marked Cards: Chi-Squared Tests and How to Beat a Cheater 47

5 Why it Pays to be a Stable Master: Sumo Wrestlers and Other Robust Statistics 69

6 Five-Hour Marriages: Continuous Distributions, Tests for Normality, and Juicy Hollywood Scandals 91

7 Believe It or Don't: Using Outlier Detection to Find the Weirdest of the Weird 109

8 The Battle of the Movie Monsters, Round Two: Ramping up Hypothesis Tests with Nonparametric Statistics 123

9 Models, Murphy's Law, and Public Humiliation: Regression Rules to Live By 139

Appendix A Critical Values for the Standard Normal Distribution 163

Appendix B Critical Values for the T-Distribution 165

Appendix C Critical Values for the Chi-Squared Distribution 167

Appendix D Critical Values for Grubbs' Test 169

Appendix E Critical Values for Wilcoxson Signed Rank Test: Small Sample Sizes 171

Glossary 173

Index 185

"This is a consistently entertaining and instructive book. The stories are interspersed with serious background material, and the combination works very well. This would be entirely suitable as supplementary reading for a statistics course or for an independent reading project." (MAA Reviews, 20 September 2015)