This past year I haven’t been as active on this website as I would have hoped to have been. In my defense, I was finishing up the 3rd edition of my statistics textbook, “Essentials of Behavioral and Social Science Statistics.” It’s about 350 pages (and 2 chapters) thinner than the previous edition. Instead of throwing in everything including the kitchen sink (like I did with the previous edition), I went the other way – including just the essentials this time; the essentials, albeit, still associated with a rigorous and substantial trip through the basics of descriptive and inferential statistics. I beefed up the philosophy of measurement content in Chapter 1, but most everything else was trimming, reorganizing, and clarifying concepts and statistical tools. Contrary to intuition, the process of selecting, cutting, and reassembling is waaay more time-consuming and tedious that one might imagine (or at least much longer than I imagined when I started out on this project).

I kept the accumulating reviews (a unique feature designed to help students with their diagnostic skills) and beefed up the side-bar discussions, especially the string of essays addressing the replication crisis currently rocking the social, medical, and pharmacological sciences (see this story for a recent example). I cleaned-up and streamlined the end-of-chapter exercises and work problems, the software tutorials, and the answer appendix in the back. Now, I would argue, it is much more feasible to go through the entire textbook in one 15 to 16 week semester.

Looking back on the project, I believe it would have been much easier to start from scratch and write a brand new textbook. However, this way I was able to save what was best about the previous work and also keep a line of continuity between previous editions of the text and this one for the professors and universities that have used been using these previous versions. All in all, I’m very pleased with the project (much more pleased than I was with the second edition) but I’m also glad the project is finally over.

My intention will be to return to posting more essay blog posts and book reviews on this website. We’ll see what the new year holds.