Excel 2016 for Social Work Statistics ― A Guide to Solving Practical Problems

This text is a step-by-step guide for students taking a first course in statistics for social work and for social work managers and practitioners who want to learn how to use Excel to solve practical statistics problems in in the workplace, whether or not they have taken a course in statistics.

There is no other text for a first course in social work statistics that teaches students, step-by-step, how to use Excel to solve interesting social work statistics problems. Excel 2016 for Social Work Statistics explains statistical formulas and offers practical examples for how students can solve real-world social work statistics problems. This book leaves detailed explanations of statistical theory to other statistics textbooks and focuses entirely on practical, real-world problem solving.

Each chapter briefly explains a topic and then demonstrates how to use Excel commands and formulas to solve specific social work statistics problems. This book gives practice in using Excel in two different ways: (1) writing formulas (e.g., confidence interval about the mean, one-group t-test, two-group t-test, correlation) and (2) using Excel’s drop-down formula menus so as not to have to write formulas (e.g., simple linear regression, multiple correlation and multiple regression, and one-way ANOVA). Three practice problems are provided at the end of each chapter, along with their solutions in an Appendix. An additional Practice Test allows readers to test their understanding of each chapter by attempting to solve a specific practical social work statistics problem using Excel; the solution to each of these problems is also given in an Appendix.

Tom Quirk is Professor of Marketing in the Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches Marketing Statistics, Marketing Research, and Pricing Strategies. He holds both an M.A. in Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Stanford University, a B.S. in Mathematics from John Carroll University, and an M.B.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He researched full-time for six years at the American Institutes for Research in Palo, Alto, California, and the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. This book is Professor Quirk’s 33rd statistics book with Springer, covering twelve subject areas (business, education, psychology, social science, biological and life sciences, physical sciences, engineering, human resources, health services management, environmental sciences, and marketing) using four versions of Excel (2007, 2010, 2013, 2016).