Statistics for Political Analysis: Understanding the Numbers

Statistics for Political Analysis will be an introduction to stats geared to political science students. Marchant-Shapiro will focus on the statistical tools most often used by political scientists and will use political examples, cases, and data throughout to show students how to answer real questions about politics using real political data. Her goal is to provide clear and accessible explanation and instruction so students not only understand the math, but can do the math. But instead of focusing on equations, Marchant-Shapiro will take a “how to” approach to doing the math, making the book much more approachable to political science students. Each chapter follows a 4-part structure: 1) the concept will be introduced with a real world example; 2) the statistical measure will be calculated using math; 3) the statistical concept will be used to solve a real-world problem using a political example, and 4) the student will use the concept to solve another real-world problem. Her exercises include those requiring hand-calculations and those requiring a statistical package like SPSS, and ask students to produce memos to emphasize how marketable and applicable their new skills are to a broad array of careers and jobs.