Statistics by Us for You
Welcome
This is a free, open graduate statistics textbook for the social and behavioral sciences. “Free” in two ways: it costs nothing, and you are welcome to read it, use it, and help make it better. We wrote it because we wanted one place where a curious student could learn not just how to run an analysis, but why it works and when to trust it.
The book grows out of decades of teaching and research. Wherever we can, we use real data and real decisions from our own published work, so you can see how these methods behave outside a tidy example. Every analysis is written in R and runs as you read — nothing is hidden behind a curtain, and you are encouraged to change the code and see what happens.
You do not need to be a mathematician to follow along. You need curiosity, a little patience, and a willingness to try the code yourself. Start at the beginning if the subject is new to you, or jump straight to a chapter you need today. However you read it, our hope is the same: that statistics stops feeling like a set of rules to memorize and starts feeling like a clear way of thinking about uncertainty.
The book lives online at pem725.github.io/GradStats-Book and is developed openly on GitHub. Read it, run it, and tell us how to make it better.
Graduate Statistics in Plain Ol’ English by Patrick E. McKnight, Simone C. McKnight, Jeffrey Stuewig, and Todd B. Kashdan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.