Aims of the book

This text has three principal objectives. The first is to provide an elementary and very informal introduction to the fundamental concepts and techniques of modern quantitative methods. A primer cannot be comprehensive, but we will cover many of the procedures most widely used in research in the historical and social sciences. The book is deliberately written at a very basic level. It does not include any statistical theory or mathematics, and there is no attempt to prove any of the statistical propositions. It has been planned on the assumption that those reading it have no retained knowledge of statistics, and very little of mathematics beyond simple arithmetic.

It is assumed that the material in the book will be taught in conjunction with one of the several statistical packages now available for use with computers, for example, SPSS for Windows, STATA, MINITAB, or SAS. By using the computer to perform all the relevant statistical calculations and manipulations it is possible to eliminate both the need to learn numerous formulae, and also the tedious work of doing laborious calculations. However, if the computer is going to provide the results, then it is absolutely essential that the student should be able to understand and interpret the content and terminology of the printouts, of which figure 1.1 is a typical specimen, and the second objective of the book is to achieve this.