The contributors to Best Practices in Quantitative Methods envision quantitative methods in the 21st century, identify the best practices, and, where possible, demonstrate the superiority of their recommendations empirically. Editor Jason W. Osborne designed this book with the goal of providing readers with the most effective, evidence-based, modern quantitative methods and quantitative data analysis across the social and behavioral sciences. The text is divided into five main sections covering select best practices in Measurement, Research Design, Basics of Data Analysis, Quantitative Methods, and Advanced Quantitative Methods. Each chapter contains a current and expansive review of the literature, a case for best practices in terms of method, outcomes, inferences, etc., and broad-ranging examples along with any empirical evidence to show why certain techniques are better. Key Features: Describes important implicit knowledge to readers: The chapters in this volume explain the important details of seemingly mundane aspects of quantitative research, making them accessible to readers and demonstrating why it is important to pay attention to these details. Compares and contrasts analytic techniques: The book examines instances where there are multiple options for doing things, and make recommendations as to what is the "best" choice—or choices, as what is best often depends on the circumstances. Offers new procedures to update and explicate traditional techniques: The featured scholars present and explain new options for data analysis, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the new procedures in depth, describing how to perform them, and demonstrating their use. Intended Audience: Representing the vanguard of research methods for the 21st century, this book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers who want a comprehensive, authoritative resource for practical and sound advice from leading experts in quantitative methods.

Provides an introduction to the diverse subject area of experimental design, with many practical and applicable exercises to help the reader understand, present and analyse the data. The pragmatic approach offers technical training for use of designs and teaches statistical and non-statistical skills in design and analysis of project studies throughout science and industry. - Provides an introduction to the diverse subject area of experimental design and includes practical and applicable exercises to help understand, present and analyse the data - Offers technical training for use of designs and teaches statistical and non-statistical skills in design and analysis of project studies throughout science and industry - Discusses one-factor designs and blocking designs, factorial experimental designs, Taguchi methods and response surface methods, among other topics

This book focuses on experimental research in two disciplines that have a lot of common ground in terms of theory, experimental designs used, and methods for the analysis of experimental research data: education and psychology. Although the methods covered in this book are also frequently used in many other disciplines, including sociology and medicine, the examples in this book come from contemporary research topics in education and psychology. Various statistical packages, commercial and zero-cost Open Source ones, are used. The goal of this book is neither to cover all possible statistical methods out there nor to focus on a particular statistical software package. There are many excellent statistics textbooks on the market that present both basic and advanced concepts at an introductory level and/or provide a very detailed overview of options in a particular statistical software programme. This is not yet another book in that genre. Core theme of this book is a heuristic called the question-design-analysis bridge: there is a bridge connecting research questions and hypotheses, experimental design and sampling procedures, and common statistical methods in that context. Each statistical method is discussed in a concrete context of a set of research question with directed (one-sided) or undirected (two-sided) hypotheses and an experimental setup in line with these questions and hypotheses. Therefore, the titles of the chapters in this book do not include any names of statistical methods such as ‘analysis of variance’ or ‘analysis of covariance’. In a total of seventeen chapters, this book covers a wide range of topics of research questions that call for experimental designs and statistical methods, fairly basic or more advanced.

This open access textbook provides the background needed to correctly use, interpret and understand statistics and statistical data in diverse settings. Part I makes key concepts in statistics readily clear. Parts I and II give an overview of the most common tests (t-test, ANOVA, correlations) and work out their statistical principles. Part III provides insight into meta-statistics (statistics of statistics) and demonstrates why experiments often do not replicate. Finally, the textbook shows how complex statistics can be avoided by using clever experimental design. Both non-scientists and students in Biology, Biomedicine and Engineering will benefit from the book by learning the statistical basis of scientific claims and by discovering ways to evaluate the quality of scientific reports in academic journals and news outlets.

This bestselling professional reference has helped over 100,000 engineers and scientists with the success of their experiments. The new edition includes more software examples taken from the three most dominant programs in the field: Minitab, JMP, and SAS. Additional material has also been added in several chapters, including new developments in robust design and factorial designs. New examples and exercises are also presented to illustrate the use of designed experiments in service and transactional organizations. Engineers will be able to apply this information to improve the quality and efficiency of working systems.

In all the experimental sciences, good design of experiments is crucial to the success of research. Well-planned experiments can provide a great deal of information efficiently and can be used to test several hypotheses simultaneously. This book is about the statistical principles of good experimental design and is intended for all applied statisticians and practising scientists engaged in the design, implementation and analysis of experiments. Professor Mead has written the book with the emphasis on the logical principles of statistical design and employs a minimum of mathematics. Throughout he assumes that the large-scale analysis of data will be performed by computers and he is thus able to devote more attention to discussions of how all of the available information can be used to extract the clearest answers to many questions. The principles are illustrated with a wide range of examples drawn from medicine, agriculture, industry and other disciplines. Numerous exercises are given to help the reader practise techniques and to appreciate the difference that good design of experiments can make to a scientific project.