bad stats and methods courses

[chaos]

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I recently transferred from a community college to a university, and I have come to realize that my stats and methods courses at the CC were extremely sub average and I am not at all prepared in these areas. My stats teacher spent the ENTIRE semester making us do t-tests and z-scores by hand and we barely touched on anything else, and my methods teacher just had us come up with a research study and SHE did all the calculations for us. Maybe some community colleges have strong research backgrounds, but mine certainly wasn't one of them. The problem is, I really, REALLY don't have time to audit stats and methods before I graduate...but I still have my old stats and methods books. From people who've actually taken real stats and methods, do you think I could learn everything I need to from just the textbooks or is it something I need to take for real?

 

[Psyclops]

it depends, i think if you were motivated you could get it from the book.

 

[PsychoDynamo]

Recommend any good books to teach yourself statistics? Particularly in an applied way towards using SPSS? I don't think I really need to know the math to do an ANOVA by hand, just when its appropriate to use, homoscedacity issues, and how to do it in SPSS, etc.

 

[Jon4PsyD]

There's a book by Graviter that is really good.
Honestly, I have a professor whose LIFE is this stuff. She's in the process of writing her own book (Once the divorce goes through, so her ex cant make any $$ off it!) and so we do a TON of stuff. But even many universities only do T-tests in Inferential Stats...at least according to her.

 

[SaraL124]

If you have good grades in these courses I don't think it matters. You will need to take both Stats and Research Methods again when you get to grad school.

My Stats teacher at an Ivy League undergrad focused on the same things, only we spent a little bit of time on SPSS and ANOVA and regression. And I never even took Research Methods as it wasn't offered at my school. As a first year student, I am taking Stats again (required of everyone) and I will take Research Methods next term (also required of everyone). Most people in my class had no experience with SPSS either, so it's not a huge deal.

 

[clinpsychgirl]

If you have good grades in these courses I don't think it matters. You will need to take both Stats and Research Methods again when you get to grad school.

My Stats teacher at an Ivy League undergrad focused on the same things, only we spent a little bit of time on SPSS and ANOVA and regression. And I never even took Research Methods as it wasn't offered at my school. As a first year student, I am taking Stats again (required of everyone) and I will take Research Methods next term (also required of everyone). Most people in my class had no experience with SPSS either, so it's not a huge deal.

I second Sara's comments. I had two semesters of statistics through the math department at my undergraduate institution and, honestly, it sounded like we had a very similar course outline to what you are describing. Since then, I've also taken (and am taking) a couple of graduate level stats courses. The first one totally rehashed everything I covered as an undergraduate. The second one (which I am currently enrolled in) delves into regression analysis and SPSS applications and is the first "useful" stats course I've ever taken. So, I wouldn't be too concerned about missing information. You should get the information you need at the graduate level.

 

[chaos]

ok, thanks for the info 🙂 glad to know i'm not too far behind.