Written by a social worker for social work students, this is a nuts and bolts guide to statistics that presents complex calculations and concepts in clear, easy-to-understand language. It includes numerous examples, data sets, and issues that students will encounter in social work practice. The first section introduces basic concepts and terms to…

The need for using invariance procedures to establish the external validity or generalizability of statistical results has been well documented. Invariance analysis is a tool that can be used to establish confidence in the replicability of research findings. Several approaches to invariance analysis are available that are broadly applicable across…

As schools move toward performance assessment, there is increasing discussion of using these assessments for accountability purposes. When used for making decisions, performance assessments must meet high standards of validity and reliability. One major source of unreliability in performance assessments is interrater disagreement. In this paper,…

There is a natural tension between experimentally designed studies and case studies, which differ in that they are not concerned with the interaction of variables in the quantitative and statistical sense. This paper describes a study that was not experimentally designed, but its major findings were generalizable to the overall population of…