This user-friendly text is designed specifically for social work students who are intimidated by the prospect of taking a Statistics course. With its engaging, conversational writing style and numerous examples and problems, social work students will quickly learn to understand and interpret both quantitative and qualitative data. The text's flexibility makes it suitable for a variety of teaching styles. Instructors who want their students to get the actual "feel" of computing a chi square can use the "Formula Alerts" to calculate certain statistics manually; other instructors may want students to use the step-by-step computer applications to produce the same results.

This introductory text clearly presents information on the analysis and interpretation of data generated by social workers in practice. It covers the nature of data, measures of variability, crosstabulation analysis, correlational methods, hypothesis testing, and multiple regression. Pertinent social work examples are used throughout.

Applied Cross-Cultural Data Analysis for Social Work is a research guide for examining and interpreting data for the purpose of cultural group comparisons. This book aims to provide practical applications in statistical approaches of data analyses that are commonly used in cross-cultural research and evaluation. Readers are presented with step-by-step illustrations in the use of descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate statistics to compare cross-cultural population using large-scale, population-based survey data. These techniques have important applications in health, mental health, and social science research relevant to social work and other helping professions, especially in providing a framework of evidence to examine health disparities using population-health data. For each statistical approach discussed in this book, Thanh V. Tran and Keith T. Chan explain the underlying purpose, basic assumptions, types of variables, application of the Stata statistical package, the presentation of statistical findings, and the interpretation of results. Unlike previous guides on statistical approaches and data analysis in social work, this book explains and demonstrates the strategies of cross-cultural data analysis using descriptive and bivariate analysis, multiple regression, additive and multiplicative interaction, mediation, SEM and HLM for subgroup analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. This book also includes sample syntax from Stata for social work researchers to conduct cross-cultural analysis with their own research.

This slim volume is one of a number of excellent guides published as part of Oxford's "Pocket Guide to Social Work Research Methods" series. Compact but comprehensive, it provides a thorough introduction to one of the fastest-growing genres of research in the social work field today: secondary data analysis. After an all-too-brief summary of what constitutes this genre and a balanced analysis of its advantages and disadvantages, Vartanian (Bryn Mawr) provides guidelines for those considering the feasibility and appropriateness of using secondary data in their work. He then offers extensive summaries of 29 of the most commonly used secondary data sets. For all of the data sets, he provides a full and complete description, including key characteristics and where and how to access them. He also provides, most valuably, citations to examples of how researchers have recently used them in their empirical work. Rather redundantly, a similar package of information appears in appendixes at the end of the book. This is an admirable contribution whose only detractions are the rather random and poorly identified screenshots and other "pictures" interspersed throughout the text. Those seriously considering using secondary data analysis in their research should find this book immensely beneficial. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by J. C. Altman.

Written by a social worker for social work students, this is a nuts and bolts guide to statistics that presents complex calculations and concepts in clear, easy-to-understand language. It includes numerous examples, data sets, and issues that students will encounter in social work practice. The first section introduces basic concepts and terms to provide a solid foundation in statistics. It also addresses tools used by researchers to describe and summarize data ranging from single variables to assessing the relationship between variables and cause and effect among variables. The second section focuses on inferential statistics, describing how researchers draw conclusions about whole populations based on data from samples. This section also covers confidence intervals and a variety of significance tests for examining relationships between different types of variables. Additionally, tools for multivariate analyses and data interpretation are presented. Key Features: Addresses the role of statistics in evidence-based practice and program evaluation Features examples of qualitative and quantitative analysis Each chapter contains exercise problems and questions to enhance student learning Includes electronic data sets taken from actual social work arenas Offers a full ancillary digital packet including a student guide to SPSS with accompanying Data Set, an Instructor's Manual, PowerPoint slides, and a Test Bank