David J. Bartholomew

I had high hopes for this book but was very disappointed. I found it all confusing. What the book claims to be is an introduction to statistical ideas without maths. First of all, there is some maths in the book, whether presented with formulas (and error, as in page 66, in the calculation of within-group sum of squares), and sometimes, the maths is described.
But what I found most confusing is that the book tries to introduce statistical ideas with resampling simulations and not with real life examples (which, I think, would have been more helpful and would have made things clearer). There are only a couple of actual examples. Everything else is simulated sampling distribution to resampling. But the book never says so. I understand that resampling is now easy to do and a nice alternative to the approach by formulas but the fact that this is the chosen approach is never fully explained.
So, I would not recommend this book for beginners. Again, I thought the writing was confusing and too abstract (because of the lack of examples).… (mehr)