Discovering_Statistics_Using_SPSS_2Edition2_资料5.Image.Marked.pdf

1 Some Preliminaries There are several things that I need to talk about before the main body of this book. Although it seems obvious that I would like you to read Chapter 1 first (otherwise I wouldn’t have placed it at the beginning) I am aware that many students derive little pleasure from reading statistics books in their entirety and prefer to dip into relevant chapters. With this in mind, I urge you to read Chapter 1 before any other because the contents are important in understanding what follows. The two things I need to talk about are: (1) model building and linear models; and (2) the SPSS environment itself. Bear with me, it won’t take long. 1.1. Statistical Models 1.1.1. Model Building In the social sciences we are usually interested in discovering something about a phenomenon that we assume actually exists (something I refer to as a real-world phenomenon). These real-world phenomena can be anything from the behaviour of interest rates in the economic market to the behaviour of undergraduates at the end-of-exam party. Whatever the phenomenon we desire to explain, we seek to explain it by collecting data from the real world, and then using these data to draw conclusions about what is being studied. As statisticians our job is to take the available data and to use them in a meaningful way and this often involves building statistical models of the phenomenon of interest. The reason for building statistical models of real-world data is best explained by analogy. Imagine an Why do we engineer wishes to build a bridge across build statistical models? a riv