David S. Moore - Statistics: Concepts and Controversies

Concepts and Controversies

Tenth Edition

• David S. Moore
• Purdue University

• William I. Notz
• The Ohio State University

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947188

ISBN 978-1-319-27248-7 (ePub)

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Statistics: Concepts and Controversies (SCC) is a book on statistics as a liberal discipline, that is, as part of the general education of nonmathematical students. The book grew out of one of the authors experiences in developing and teaching a course for freshmen and sophomores from Purdue Universitys School of Liberal Arts. We are pleased that other teachers have found SCC useful for unusually diverse audiences, extending as far as students of philosophy and medicine. This tenth edition is a revision of the text, with several new features. It retains, however, the goals of the original: to present statistics not as a technical tool but as part of the intellectual culture that educated people share.

Statistics has a widespread reputation as the least liberal of subjects. When statistics is praised, it is most often for its usefulness. Health professionals need statistics to read accounts of medical research; managers need statistics because efficient crunching of numbers will find its way to the bottom line; citizens need statistics to understand opinion polls and government statistics such as the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index. Because data and chance are omnipresent, as our propaganda line goes, everyone will find statistics useful, and perhaps even profitable.

This is true. We would even argue that for most students, the conceptual and verbal approach in SCC is better preparation for future encounters with statistical studies than the usual methods-oriented introduction. The joint curriculum committee of the American Statistical Association and the Mathematical Association of America recommends that any first course in statistics emphasize the elements of statistical thinking and feature more data and concepts, fewer recipes and derivations. SCC does this, with the flavor appropriate to a liberal education: more concepts, more thinking, only simple data, fewer recipes, and no formal derivations. There is, however, another justification for learning about statistical ideas: statistics belongs among the liberal arts. A liberal education emphasizes fundamental intellectual skills, that is, general methods of inquiry that apply in a wide variety of settings. The traditional liberal arts present such methods: literary and historical studies, the political and social analysis of human societies, the probing of nature by experimental science, the power of abstraction and deduction in mathematics. The case that statistics belongs among the liberal arts rests on the fact that reasoning from uncertain empirical data is a similarly general intellectual method. Data and chance, the topics of this book, are pervasive aspects of our experience. Though we employ the tools of mathematics to work with data and chance, the mathematics implements ideas that are not strictly mathematical. In fact, psychologists argue convincingly that mastering formal mathematics does little to improve our ability to reason effectively about data and chance in everyday life.

SCC is shaped, as far as the limitations of the authors and the intended readers allow, by the view that statistics is an independent and fundamental intellectual method. The focus is on statistical thinking, on what others might call quantitative literacy or numeracy.

There are books on statistical theory and books on statistical methods. This is neither. It is a book on statistical ideas and statistical reasoning and on their relevance to public policy and to the human sciences from medicine to sociology. We have included many elementary graphical and numerical techniques to give flesh to the ideas and muscle to the reasoning. Students learn to think about data by working with data. We have not, however, allowed technique to dominate concepts. Our intention is to teach verbally rather than algebraically, to invite discussion and even argument rather than mere computation, though some computation remains essential. The coverage is considerably broader than one might traditionally cover in a one-term course, as the table of contents reveals. In the spirit of general education, we have preferred breadth to detail.

Despite its informal nature, SCC is a textbook. It is organized for systematic study and has abundant exercises, many of which ask students to offer a discussion or make a judgment. Even those admirable individuals who seek pleasure in uncompelled reading should look at the exercises as well as the text. Teachers should be aware that the book is more serious than its low mathematical level suggests. The emphasis on ideas and reasoning asks more of the reader than many recipe-laden methods texts.