Research and evaluation in the human services usually involves a relatively large number of variables. We are interested in phenomena that have many aspects and many causes. The techniques needed to deal with many variables go beyond those of introductory statistics. Elementary procedures in statistics are limited in usefulness to situations in which we have two or three variables. When we have more than that, application of elementary techniques will often yield mis leading results. Why are elementary techniques inadequate when applied to many variables? Why, for example, should we not...

Research and evaluation in the human services usually involves a relatively large number of variables. We are interested in phenomena that have many aspects and many causes. The techniques needed to deal with many variables go beyond those of introductory statistics. Elementary procedures in statistics are limited in usefulness to situations in which we have two or three variables. When we have more than that, application of elementary techniques will often yield mis leading results. Why are elementary techniques inadequate when applied to many variables? Why, for example, should we not...