Statistics for Students of Psychology and Education. by Herbert SorensonReview by: Herbert A. ToopsJournal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 31, No. 195 (Sep., 1936), pp. 624-625Published by: American Statistical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2278401 .

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624 AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION*

Statistics for Students of Psychology and Education, by Herbert Sorenson. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1936. viii, 373 pp. $3.50. The author of this book quite evidently has had to contend with the diffi-

culties of students who ask questions which the conventional textbook does not answer. Also, equally evident, he has been influenced by the fact that all too often his students reveal on examination day an abysmal ignorance of some of the things which the instructor thought he had made quite clear. These are shown by the encyclopedic treatment of some of the topics [the mean and the median, for example, consume 50 pages]; by the using in many places of two numerical substitutions in a formula instead of the conven- tional one; by pointing out incorrect methods as well as correct; by the num- ber and variety of problems presented; and by the ingenious and concrete examples and illustrations frequently used.

In the preface we are told that the book aims to put its emphasis upon interpretation, logical analysis, and application of techniques; and to de- velop wholesome skepticism, critical attitude, and a keen qualitative sense (p. iv). The promise is better than the realization. The space which might have been devoted to many concrete problems for critical discussion is oc- cupied by much irrelevant material of which "The Theory of the Normal Frequency or the Normal Probability Curve" (pp. 161-162) is an example, where, after developing the excellent pedagogical device, (H + T)P, to re- place the (I +4)P in the conventional penny-tossing experiments, he fails rather signally to show any connection between such and the results of experiments, unless the very cryptic, "if a very large number of coins were tossed, the broken line connecting the tops of the verticals representing the frequency of the obtained combinations would approach a normal curve," be so dubbed,

Although the book has many excellent features summarized in the first paragraph, it lacks proportion and balance. The quality of treatment is spotty. In the first 160 pages we are taken through the averages and meas- ures of variability; then, in the next 184 pages, through a grand sweep of formulae and concepts in which the intellectual difficulties of elementary students relatively are forgotten. Evidently this is done to justify the book as a two-course book which " . . . contains essentially all the elements of statistics actually used by most graduate students." If intended to be used as a two-semester text, the book, in our opinion, does not go far enough into advanced topics.

This is one of the few texts in which, after having made the distinction, the author strives to do something with "continuous" and 'discrete" meas- ures. The result, particularly in the case of the median (which thus is made to cover 20 pages of the text), is, in the reviewer's opinion, disastrous. The reviewer has yet failed to locate a case of discrete measurements in which making the assumption of continuity would not lead to better insight, and better comparability of statistics from study to study than by attempting to deal with the scores as discrete. One wonders what, if anything, the

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* REVIEWS 625

median (either discrete or continuous), or any other measure of central tend- ency, means for any such series of ten scores as 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19; also whether the student is helped or hindered by statements such as: "When the data are discrete and odd in number, then the middle number is the median (p. 71)." That the median is a point seems not to have been appreciated; that it may be treated most economically as a special case of all percentiles has been ignored.

With the exceptions noted, the statistical practices used are excellent. We did note figures printed at the ends of bar charts (p. 30), but there is good precedent for this aberration. A valuable exercise to develop thinking about functional relationships is to be found in some 60 examples of relationships (pp. 186-188) wherein the student is required to judge whether the correla- tion is positive or negative. The chapter on Sampling, Chance and Prob- ability of Occurrence is decidedly concrete and appropriate to the kinds of students for which it is intended.

Derivations of formulae are conspicuous by their all but total absence. If supplemented with an abundance of real problems to develop more

fully the intended criticalness of judgment-particularly in the second half of the book-it is the reviewer's judgment that the text will be more effective than the average. A two-course book deliberately intended to be interpreta- tive but "not to the neglect of computational skills or the statistical tech- niques themselves" with difficulty is packed into 373 pages of large type.

HERBERT A. TooPs Ohio State University

Graphs-How to Make and Use Them, by Herbert Arkin and Raymond R. Colton. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1936. xvi, 224 pp. $3.00.

Graphic Methods for Presenting Business Statistics, by John R. Riggleman. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1936. Second Edition. xiii, 259 pp. $4.00.

Rich Man, Poor Man-Pictures of a Paradox, by Ryllis Alexander Goslin and Omar Pancoast Goslin. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1935. viii, 85 pp. $1.00. Professors Arkin and Colton have provided a brief, readable book on

graphic methods, doubtless quite adequate as a text for an elementary one- semester course in graphic presentation. It is not complete enough, however, to serve as a reference book, and the publishers do the authors an injustice when they claim " . . . every phase of the technique of making and using graphs is here discussed . . . " and again when they assert "not only are all the different methods of graphic presentation described in detail but illus- trations of all applications are reproduced from a number of fields .... .

Publishers should refrain from claiming an inclusiveness which greatly ex- ceeds the author's intention. There is more emphasis in this book on "how

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