A New View of Statistics

© 2000 Will G Hopkins

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ABOUT THESE PAGES
Last updated 16 Dec 2005


I have written these pages for researchers and students in the sport and exercise sciences. I also hope to get hits from students and researchers struggling to understand stats in other disciplines.

If you're new to stats, most of what you read here will be a new view. But even if you have done some stats, there's plenty here that's new. For example, I've discarded most details of computation, in the hope that you will get a better understanding of the concepts. Let's leave the computations to the computers! You'll also find a new unified treatment of effect statistics and their magnitudes, a new emphasis and heaps of new stuff on validity and reliability, new valid methods to calculate reliability, a new exalted position for confidence intervals, a new attack on statistical significance and hypothesis testing, the first plain-language explanation of Bayesian analysis on the Web, a new way to understand all statistical models, a new simple treatment of non-parametric analyses, a new method of doing repeated measures with missing values (yes, it's true!), new simple ways to estimate sample sizes, and best of all, a highly ethical new way to reduce sample size. And as you may have noticed, I am blazing a trail with the use of plain language for a text of this sort.

To give the pages a bit of color, I have turned the "view" into a view of hills and mountains of statistical challenges. I add features to the picture, as I climb them. Please email me if there are any you would like included, or if I'm sending people up the wrong track.

I hope some of the ideas and methods here will end up being referenced. Check how your institution or the journal you are submitting to wants you to reference websites. Here is a one way to reference the book:

Hopkins WG (2000). A New View of Statistics, http://newstatsi.org. Accessed 31 April 2006.

The (2000) refers to the first date of publication.

References to specific pages or sections should include a subject heading, for example:

Hopkins WG (2003).  Bayesian analysis.  In: A New View of Statistics, http://newstats.org/generalize.html#Bayes.  Accessed 31 April 2006.

The (2003) refers to the update date at the bottom of the page. Note that newstats.org and sportsci.org/resource/stats are synonymous.

To bookmark a particular page, you will have to right-click or control-click to open it in a new frame first. When it loads, you won't have a navigation/index frame on the left. You also won't get the navigation frame if you type in the URL for an individual page to load it. Clicking on Home brings up the navigation/index frame.

Acknowledgments
 
The following people have given valuable advice on content, layout, or stats problems:
Frank Katch , Fred Lam and Peter Herbison (University of Otago), Mary Ann Wallace, Russell Wolfinger (SAS Institute), Greg Atkinson.


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