Seeing Through Statistics

Jessica Utts is professor emerita of statistics at the University of California at Irvine. She received her B.A. in math and psychology at SUNY Binghamton and her M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics at Penn State University. Aside from MIND ON STATISTICS, Dr. Utts has authored SEEING THROUGH STATISTICS and co-authored STATISTICAL IDEAS AND METHODS, both published by Cengage Learning. Dr. Utts has been active in the statistics education community at the high school and college levels. She served as chair of the Advanced Placement Statistics Development Committee and as Chief Reader for the A.P. Statistics Exam. In 2016 she was the president of the American Statistical Association, the largest professional organization in the world for statisticians. She is a recipient of the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and the Magnar Ronning Award for Teaching Excellence, both at the University of California at Davis. She is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. Beyond statistics education, Dr. Utts’s major contributions have been in applying statistics to a variety of disciplines, most notably to parapsychology, the laboratory study of psychic phenomena. She has appeared on numerous television shows, including Larry King Live, ABC's Nightline, CNN Morning News and 20/20.

• PART 1: FINDING DATA IN LIFE.1. THE BENEFITS AND RISKS OF USING STATISTICS1.1 Why Bother Reading This Book? 1.2 What Is Statistics All About? 1.3 Detecting Patterns and Relationships. CASE STUDY 1.1 Heart or Hypothalamus? CASE STUDY 1.2 Does Aspirin Prevent Heart Attacks? 1.4 Don’t Be Deceived by Improper Use of Statistics. CASE STUDY 1.3 Using Probability to Detect Cheating. 1.5 Summary and Conclusions. Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.2. READING THE NEWS.2.1 The Educated Consumer of Data. 2.2 Origins of News Stories. 2.3 How to be a Statistics Sleuth: Seven Critical Components. 2.4 Four Hypothetical Examples of Bad Reports. CASE STUDY 2.1 Does Eating a Vegan Diet Reduce Stress and Anxiety. 2.5 Planning Your Own Study: Defining the Components in Advance. CASE STUDY 2.2 Flawed Surveys in the Classroom. Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.3. MEASUREMENTS, MISTAKES, AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS.3.1 Simple Measures Don’t Exist. 3.2 It’s All in the Wording. CASE STUDY 3.1 No Opinion of Your Own? Let Politics Decide. 3.3 Open or Closed Questions: Should Choices Be Given? CASE STUDY 3.2 Do You Know What Makes You Happy? 3.4 Defining What Is Being Measured. 3.5 Defining a Common Language. Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.4. HOW TO GET A GOOD SAMPLE.4.1 Common Research Strategies. 4.2 Defining a Common Language. 4.3 The Beauty of Sampling. 4.4 Simple Random Sampling. 4.5 Other Sampling Methods. 4.6 Difficulties and Disasters in Sampling. CASE STUDY 4.1 The Infamous Literary Digest Poll of 1936. Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.5. EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES.5.1 Defining a Common Language. 5.2 Designing a Good Experiment. CASE STUDY 5.1 Quitting Smoking with Nicotine Patches. CASE STUDY 5.2 Police Shift and Quality of Life. 5.3 Difficulties and Disasters in Experiments. CASE STUDY 5.3 Exercise Yourself to Sleep. 5.4 Designing a Good Observational Study. CASE STUDY 5.4 Baldness and Heart Attacks. 5.5 Difficulties and Disasters in Observational Studies. 5.6 Random Sample versus Random Assignment. Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References6. GETTING THE BIG PICTURE.6.1 Final Questions. CASE STUDY 6.1 Can Mediation Improve Test Scores? CASE STUDY. 6.2 Can Eating Cereal Reduce Obesity? CASE STUDY 6.3 Drinking, Driving, Sex Discrimination, and the Supreme Court. CASE STUDY 6.4 Can a Break from Social Media Improve Mental Health? CASE STUDY 6.5 For Class Discussion: Coffee and Longevity. Mini-Projects. References.PART II: FINDING LIFE IN DATA.7. SUMMARIZING AND DISPLAYING MEASUREMENT DATA.7.1 Turning Data into Information. 7.2 Picturing Data: Stemplots and Histograms. 7.3 Five Useful Numbers: A Summary. 7.4 Boxplots. 7.5 Traditional Measures: Mean, Variance, and Standard Deviation. 7.6 Caution: Being Average Isn’t Normal. CASE STUDY 7.1 Detecting Exam Cheating with a Histogram. Thinking About Key Concepts. Focus on Formulas. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.8. BELL-SHAPED CURVES AND OTHER SHAPES.8.1 Populations, Frequency Curves, and Proportions. 8.2 The Pervasiveness of Normal Curves. 8.3 Percentiles and Standardized Scores. 8.4 z-Scores and Familiar Intervals. Thinking About Key Concepts. Focus on Formulas. Exercises. References9. PLOTS, GRAPHS, AND PICTURES.9.1 Well-Designed Statistical Pictures. 9.2 Pictures of Categorical Data. 9.3 Pictures of Measurement Variables. 9.4 Pictures of Trends across Time. 9.5 Difficulties and Disasters in Plots, Graphs, and Pictures. 9.6 A Checklist for Statistical Pictures. CASE STUDY 9.1 Time to Panic about Illicit Drug Use? Thinking About Key Concepts. Exercises. Mini-Projects. References.10. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MEASUREMENT VARIABLES.10.1 Statistical Relationships. 10.2 Strength versus Statistical Significance. 10.3 Measuring Strength Through Correlation. 10.4 Specifying Linear Relationships with Regression. CASE STUDY 10.1 Ar