Welcome To My Summer

This is the book that is going to teach us how to operate the statistics computer program we will be using this month for Intro to Mixed-Methods Research:



It is 1.5 inches thick and weighs in just shy of 5 pounds.

In theory we are only learning the theory behind the math, not the math itself. That's what the ginormous book and computer program are for, to do the hard math for us.

But I don't know. . .today in class Dr. Luedke was throwing around terms like "degrees of freedom," "kurtosis," and "central limit theorem" and even though he was working hard to explain them clearly, I felt like he might as well have been speaking Greek.

Strike that - I think I would actually do better with Greek. Languages I get. Math, not so much.


ADDENDUM:
Ok, I actually started to read the ginormous book, and it's totally hilarious. The author is a Brit with a Pythonish sense of humor and the introduction is basically "I hate boring textbooks so I thought I would write one that I would actually want to read." He admits SPSS is a stupid tool that relies too heavily on users already knowing what they are doing. He includes cartoon pictures alongside the text, various characters to indicate things like what is the bare bones need to know info and what is interesting to statisticians but tangential to the main point. There is also a picture of a cat who just shows up to "look cute and make bad cat-related jokes" and all the SPSS tips are disseminated by "Satan's Personal Statistics Slave."

Want a taste of what I'm talking about? Under a section titled "What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here" he writes:

You're probably wondering why you have bought this book. Maybe you liked the pictures, maybe you fancied doing some weight training (it is heavy), or perhaps you need to reach something in a high place (it is thick). The chances are, though, that given the choice of spending your hard-earned cash on a statistics book or something more entertaining (a nice novel, a trip to the cinema, etc), you'd choose the latter. So, why have you bought the book (or downloaded an illegal pdf of it from someone who has way too much time on their hands if they can scan an 800 page textbook)? It's likely that you obtained it because you're doing a course on statistics, or you're doing some research, and you need to know how to analyse data. It's possible that you didn't realize when you started your course or research that you'd have to know this much about statistics but now find yourself inexplicably wading, neck high, through the Victorian sewer that is data analysis.

Andy Field, you are my new hero.


ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM (or, Notes from the Sewer):

Despite Andy Field's humor and Dr. Luedke's valiant efforts to make it all make sense, I have decided SPSS really stands for "Statistics are the Pure Spawn of Satan."

Confirming this belief: three conversations yesterday, at different times, with different friends, all of whom are in public policy/services and had to learn SPSS for school and/or work. When they heard that's what I was up to this month, each of them had the same response - first, utmost sympathy. Then, dawning puzzlement as they asked me "What's your program again? Why do you have to learn this?"

My question exactly. :)