Statistical Software and Guides
Free Software for Performing Statistical Analyses
JASP software. The following link takes you to the site where you can download JASP, a free, open-source, comprehensive, and user-friendly application that performs statistical analyses. For most procedures it reports p values, confidence intervals, and indices of effect size. For most it also creates graphs that illustrate the results. It performs a wide variety of procedures, from elementary (like descriptives) through advanced (like factor analysis). To keep things simple, here’s a list of procedures covered in my book on APA style which can be performed with JASP: frequency tables, boxplots, descriptive statistics (such as means, medians, standard deviations, kurtosis, skewness), single-sample t test including Cohen’s d and confidence intervals for Cohen’s d), independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, ANOVA with one between-subjects factor (including omnibus significance tests and effect size, focused-comparison significance test and effect size, and confidence intervals), ANOVA with two between-subject factors (including tests for simple effects), ANOVA with one within-subjects factor, different types of correlation coefficients (with confidence intervals), scatterplots, regression, and chi-square test of independence. It can perform analyses to help you determine whether your data have satisfied the assumptions underlying specific data-analysis procedures. It produces tables that are already in APA style—you can typically just copy them from the JASP output and paste them directly into your report manuscript. For most procedures, it shows how to perform the frequentist analyses that are currently taught in most statistics courses, as well as their Bayesian-statistic counterparts.
https://jasp-stats.org/
ESCI software. The links provided below pertain to Geoff Cumming’s free statistical software called ESCI (for Exploratory Software for Confidence Intervals). Although ESCI can be used as a teaching aid to help students understand basic statistical concepts such as sampling distributions and confidence intervals, many of its modules are powerful enough to allow users to input their own data and compute statistics for research reports. ESCI is oriented around Cumming’s “new statistics:” the emerging paradigm that places more emphasis on effect size, confidence intervals, and meta-analysis, and little or no emphasis on p values. To this end, it computes several different indices of effect size, computes confidence intervals for many of them (including Cohen’s d) and can even perform meta-analysis for a limited number of studies (30 at this writing). ESCI can perform most of the statistical analyses taught in an elementary statistics courses, including descriptive statistics, independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, bivariate correlation, bivariate regression, comparisons of up to six independent group means (similar to one-way ANOVA), and 2 x 2 independent-groups factorial designs (similar to two-way ANOVA). It can also create many types of graphs, including histograms, dot plots, scatterplots, and error-bar plots. ESCI is actually a macro that runs under Microsoft Office Excel, so be sure to enable macros in Excel—by default macros are normally turned off. At the web site, The New Statistics, Cumming provides tons of information for anyone interested in research, data analysis, and the open-science movement. You can learn even more in his most-excellent books Understanding the New Statistics: Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals, and Meta-Analysis (Cumming, 2012) and Introduction to the New Statistics: Estimation, Open Science, and Beyond, 1st Edition (Cumming & Calin-Jageman, 2017).
Here’s the link to Cumming’s The New Statistics web site:
www.thenewstatistics.com
And here’ the link where you can download ESCI (it’s at his textbook publisher’s website):
https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138825529/
Free Guides for Performing Statistical Analyses
Discovering Statistics with SPSS. The following link takes you to Andy Field’s DiscoveringStatistics.com—the companion website to his popular books on data analysis. The site offers many free PDF downloads that show how to use IBM SPSS Statistics to perform a wide variety of statistical analyses. Here’s a list of topics covered by his free PDFs that are particularly relevant to my book on APA style: checking assumptions underlying common statistical procedures (the Beast of Bias), independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, ANOVA with one between-subjects factor, ANOVA with two between-subject factors, ANOVA with one within-subjects factor, different types of correlation coefficients, regression analysis, chi-square test of independence, and creating and editing bar charts and other types of graphs.
https://www.discoveringstatistics.com/
JASP videos: Statistics of Doom. The following takes you to Dr. Erin M. Buchanan's YouTube channel which is full of videos that show how to perform statistical analyses with apps such as JASP, IBM SPSS Statistics, R, and Excel. The channel is extremely helpful and jaw-dropping in its comprehensiveness (over 40 videos on JASP alone!).
Dr. Buchanan’s JASP playlist at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw93TUuxrFAa5MWN9Eg61MQhZVV6ZrtUT
Home page for Dr. Buchanan’s Statistics of Doom YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMdihazndR0f9XBoSXWqnYg
JASP videos: Official channel. The following takes you to the official YouTube channel for JASP Statistics. Be aware that some videos show how to perform traditional frequentist analyses (the type of analysis currently taught in most statistics courses), while others show how to perform the Bayesian version of the analysis—a different approach to data analysis that is likely to become much more popular in the near future. At this writing, the site offers only a limited number of instructional videos but look for it to grow in time.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSulowI4mXFyBkw3bmp7pXg
ESCI videos. Following takes you to Geoff Cumming’s YouTube channel which—among other things—shows how to use his free ESCI software to perform a wide variety of statistical analyses. They are oriented around the “new statistics” which place great emphasis on effect size, confidence intervals, and meta-analysis and little or no emphasis on p values.
https://www.youtube.com/user/geoffdcumming/feed?disable_polymer=1
Online Resource for Training and Assistance with Statistics
The Analysis Factor. The following takes you to The Analysis Factor, a comprehensive resource where you can get answers to your questions about statistics and join a large community of students, researchers, and other professionals who are interested in research and data analysis. Among other things, the site offers live monthly webinars, live weekly Q & A sessions where you can get immediate answers to your questions, a private forum where you can ask questions anonymously, access to recordings of previous webinars, and access to a searchable resource library with information on every imaginal topic research methods and statistics. Well-worth the monthly or annual fee.
https://www.theanalysisfactor.com/