Statistics for the Health Sciences

A Non-Mathematical Introduction

This book by Dancey, Reidy and Rowe gives everything it promises: a non-mathematical introduction to statistics. It contains no mathematical formula, and gives a very basic explanation of statistical theory and the most common statistical analysis techniques. In my opnion too basic perhaps, because sometimes a simple formula can explain more than a page of text. The book provides clear instructions about perfoming the analyses with SPSS, using a lot of self-explanatory screenshots.

This book is excellent and provides clear and informative feedback, that makes a difficult subject simple

I like the non-mathematical approach of this book, and I think it will be accessible to students struggling with the subject. Because it is targeted at health sciences, it covers techniques that might not otherwise be covered in a beginners' book, i.e. logistic regression and survival analysis, which is very welcome for me as a lecturer on a public health course.

This textbook is an excellent non-mathematical introduction to statistics, although some ability in mathematics is required to be able to grasp many of the core concepts. I would recommend this text rather than making it essential reading for my students because the majority choose to undertake qualitative rather than quantitative research projects. It would be a highly useful resource for anyone planning to undertake statistical analysis using SPSS as there are a number of practical examples and exercises throughout the book. I have actually referred to it in conducting my own analyses and found it to be easy to follow.

This book is going to be of great use to the half dozen or so quantitative empirical researchers that we see on this course and simply because of the number I will refer to this as supplemental. I can see the students really engaging with the simple page layouts and wording.

I found this very easy to read and understand key concepts in basic statistics. It influenced the way I delivered sessions to students and I will recommend it to support learning with the next cohort of students that I do the same statistics sessions with.

I would have adopted this book but I did not receive it in time and was not able to review it. Also, it did not have all the extra information (databases, powerpoints, etc) that came with the Andy Field book. However, I may use this book in the future.

Highly recommended. User friendly and meaningful application

Text provides a clear presentation of statistics which will provide undergraduate nursing students with a good resource for use in proposal development and / or sytematic reviews.

This is a great book for pharmacy students (and other health professionals) to gain an understanding of statistics and supplements the course currently provided to students well.