Package The Essentials of Political Analysis, 2nd Edition with An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis, 3rd Edition (now updated for SPSS 16.0)!
The Essentials of Political Analysis, 2nd Edition
Hypothesis testing? Correlation? Did you say logistic regression?? You are probably used to seeing concerned looks on the faces of your methods students. Student anxiety about this course always runs high given the nature of seemingly intimidating material. Philip Pollock’s first order of business is to get math-phobic students comfortable learning and using the tools of political analysis. His brief and accessible text puts students at ease with a conversational writing style and plenty of real-world and political examples.
Providing a strong conceptual foundation, The Essentials of Political Analysis walks students through the basics—measuring concepts, formulating and testing hypotheses, describing variables—and then, through a companion SPSS volume with easy-to-use canned data sets, prepares them to apply what they learn immediately on the computer. The author’s engaging and straightforward prose clearly introduces key terms and concepts while chapter-opening objectives cue students to learning goals. Over eighty tables and figures enhance important textual material. Class-tested chapter exercises promote skill application and aid student review.
Fans of Pollock’s practical introduction to the methods course will appreciate the second edition’s many improvements, from more comparative and international material to a brand new chapter on logistic regression. Introducing students to one of the discipline’s most widely used statistical tools, students learn the logic of logistic regression, maximum likelihood estimation and how to convert logits into probabilities.
An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis, 3rd Edition
In his popular workbook, An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis, Philip H. Pollock III gets students using actual political data and working with a software tool that prepares them for future political science courses.
Now updated using SPSS 16.0, the new third edition is a no-nonsense and friendly introduction to using SPSS: students learn through a series of guided examples, reference 120 screenshots, and can count on step-by-step instructions to all procedures. As in previous editions, the workbook covers the full array of data analysis procedures from introductory to advanced, including descriptive statistics and data transformations, to dummy variables and interaction effects. A final chapter shows students how to code data and how to read it into SPSS.
With 50% more exercises than in the previous edition, students not only interact with a range of substantive political science questions, but encounter more exercises on comparative and international politics, investigating such topics as the relative importance of cultural and institutional factors in shaping political parties or the extent to which wealth is equally distributed within countries.
The third edition also delves deeper into the use of graphic display to complement empirical results. Students learn state of the art editing techniques using SPSS Chart Editor, while following protocols described by leading experts in the graphic display of quantitative information. In addition to creating simple bar charts and line graphs, students will learn to produce scatterplots and logistic regression curves.
The datasets have been thoroughly updated and expanded, and include a set for student version users. A solutions manual with answers to all of the exercises is available to adopters.