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Julie F. Pallant
(2001). Allen & Unwin. 304 pp. $35.00 (spiral)
Julie Pallant's first book is hot off the press and presumably the lifebuoy featured on its cover symbolises that help is at hand for those in peril on a statistical sea. The SPSS Survival Manual represents the author's distilled knowledge of packaged statistics abstracted from more than a decade of hands-on experience both as a postgraduate student and as a teacher of postgraduate students. It is more than just another how-to-do-SPSS book. It navigates the reader through the research process from the formulation of hypotheses in the form of answerable research questions; designing the study; data entry; choosing and applying the right statistical tools; interpreting the outcomes of tool-applications; and finally, how to report these results in relation to the original hypotheses. If all this is not enough, students are provided with a report-writing model from the book's website.
Although the book was not designed to `stand alone' (p. xiv), I'm quite confident (p <...