고급통계교과서는 아니다. 통계학과에서 배우는 것처럼 함수도출을 수리적으로 한다든가 하는 것은 나오지 않는다. SPSS나 SAS를 쓰는데 필요한 정도의 지식만 제시된다. 그 통계적 방법의 의미만 건드리는 것이다. 사회과학 통계서적이 다 그렇다. 이책의 장점은 설명이 명료하고 간단하면서 실제 사례가 풍부하게 제시되었다는 것이다. 그러나 실제 리서치를 할 때 유용하지는 않다. 실제 분석에선 이책에 소개된 것보다 더 고급을 쓰게 되기 때문이다. 초보자에게는 좋지만 실제 연구자에게 유용한 것은 아니다.
다음은 내가 아마존에 썼던 리뷰이다
This book is a statistics textbook for students of social sciences, not high-end users. I read earlier edition of this book in undergraduate statistics course. In that course, only basics of statistics were instructed. In social sciences, they don't need to know A to Z of statistics for all they have to know is what the function of SPSS or SAS means and what kind of data is needed and how the data would be analyzed in the statistics packages. There is no need to derive the functions in the textbook mathematically as they do in the courses of statistics department. We should understand what the function means, not how it is derived. This book is written in this regard. Unlike orthodox statistics textbook, this book tackles only the meaning of the statistical methods. In doing so, this book illustrates the methods with various field works and SPSS exercises. This is the stance most textbook written for social scientists takes. It seems that this book succeed in achieving the goal. Explanations are succinct and examples are apposite.
But this book is not that useful when you should do real research. Most social sciences articles use more advanced methods than what this book introduces. This book is good enough to beginners, but not so to who would be real researcher. At that point, you should have read more advanced ones already. If not, you couldn't read a piece of article in the common journals.