Statistics without Math

About this book

Excellent introductory text for ecology students.

From the publisher's announcement:

Statistics without Math is not your typical statistics book; nor is it designed to serve as a substitute for conventional statistical texts. Experience with ecology students and researchers has shown that too much mathematical detail diverts attention away from basic logical concepts, resulting in errors in sampling design, data analysis, and comprehension of the ecological literature. Hence, this book starts with real-world observations and explains how statistics may be used as a practical tool to answer questions about them, and to clearly communicate these results. The book targets intermediate-level statistics (given short shrift in most books and courses), and teaches concepts with a minimum of mathematical detail, instead using simple graphs and, where necessary, analogy. This approach, class-tested for many years by the authors, has revolutionized students' ability to understand statistics.

Contents

Introduction; Flow Charts and Scientific Questions; Describing Things: Some "Scientific" Conventions and Useful Techniques; How Much Evidence Is Enough?; When Highly Improbable Means Very Unlikely; How to Avoid Accumulating Risk in Simple Comparisons; Analyses for a World with All Shades of Gray; Real-World Problems: More Than One Factor; Which Variables Should I Analyze Statistically?; More Complex Models: Stringing Things Together; Straightening the World: Transformations and Other Tricks; Multivariate Statistics: Cutting Down the Trees to Better See the Forest; How to Write Better Backwards

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