An EasyGuide to Research Design and SPSS

An EasyGuide to Experimental Design and SPSS is a handbook that provides clear and concise guidance for research methods students faced with the many decisions involved in developing the most appropriate strategy to test a hypothesis. By presenting an integrated approach to the choice of design and statistical analysis this handbook helps students connect the choice of experimental design with the choice of an appropriate statistical test for data analyses. The EasyGuide also presents the exact steps to analyze data in SPSS, including ample screenshots. The authors provide a how-to for interpreting the output from SPSS analyses, and they help students format the relevant SPSS output into an APA-style results section.

Beth M. Schwartz is the Provost and Professor of Psychology at Endicott College. Previously she served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost and Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, in Tiffin, Ohio. Dr. Schwartz started her career on the faculty at Randolph College (founded as Randolph-Macon Woman′s College) in Lynchburg, VA, where she served for 24 years. At Randolph she was the William E. and Catherine Ehrman Thoresen ‘23 Professor of Psychology and Assistant Dean of the College. She received a BA at Colby College (Maine) and a PhD in cognitive psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her scholarship focuses on the scholarship of teaching and learning/pedagogical research, in particular the issues surrounding academic integrity and honor systems. In addition to numerous professional presentations at conferences, she has published many book chapters and articles in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Higher Education, Ethics and Behavior, Law and Human Behavior, and Applied Developmental Science. She has also edited and coauthored books, including Child Abuse: A Global View(Schwartz, McCauley, & Epstein, 2001), Optimizing Teaching and Learning (Gurung & Schwartz, 2012), and Evidence-Based Teaching for Higher Education (Schwartz & Gurung, 2012). She is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Psychological Society and is a Fellow of Division 2 of APA (Society for the Teaching of Psychology). She was an award-winning teacher at Randolph College, where she taught Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods, Cognitive Psychology, and the capstone course. She received the Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring from the American Psych-Law Society, the Gillie A. Larew Award for Distinguished Teaching at Randolph College, the Katherine Graves Davidson Excellence in Scholarship Award from Randolph College, and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Certificate from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

 

 

Janie Wilson received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina in 1994. Since that time, she has been teaching and conducting research at Georgia Southern University. In the classroom, Dr. Wilson specializes in teaching and learning in statistics and research methods. Research interests include rapport in teaching based on empirical data on the first day of class, electronic communications, interactions with students in a traditional classroom, syllabus design, and the development and validation of the Professor-Student Rapport Scale. Recent publications include two brief texts with SAGE: An EasyGuide to Research Presentations and An EasyGuide to Research Design and SPSS. Along with her colleague, Shauna Joye, she recently published Research Methods and Statistics: An Integrated Approach with SAGE. Dr. Wilson has contributed numerous chapters to edited books and has co-edited several books related to teaching and learning. She has published extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning and has offered over 60 conference presentations, including several invited keynote addresses. Dr. Wilson is the Past President of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP), Division Two of APA. 

Dennis M. Goff received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Virginia Tech in 1985. He has been teaching and conducting research at Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) since 1986. He specializes in teaching and learning in statistics and developmental psychology with a burgeoning interest in evolutionary psychology. In the past 27 years, he has mentored hundreds of senior psychology majors as they completed their independently designed research projects. In recent years, all of those seniors have presented their work at regional conferences, and a few have earned recognition for best undergraduate research projects. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He has been recognized at Randolph by being named a Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology and given the Gillie A. Larew Award for Teaching Excellence and the Katherine Graves Davidson Award for Excellence in Promoting the College.