Originally published in 1982, this book describes those basic ideas and techniques of statistics which should be known to every social scientist. The explanations are given in careful detail at a level of mathematical sophistication which will be readily attainable by students meeting statistical methods for the first time.

All the methods described are applied to, and sometimes are motivated by, genuine problems of interest arising in sociology, social policy, politics or human geography. The authors often provide a meaningful discussion of the substantive problem itself in...