Book excerpt: Do your students lack confidence in their ability to handle quantitative work? Do they get confused about how to enter statistical data on SAS, SPSS, and Excel programs? The new Third Edition of the bestselling Statistics for the Social Sciences is the solution to these dilemmas Popular in previous editions, this Third Edition continues to help build students' confidence and ability in doing statistical analysis by slowly moving from concepts that require little computational work to those that require more. Author R. Mark Sirkin once again demonstrates how statistics can be used so that students come to appreciate their usefulness rather than fearing them. Statistics for the Social Sciences emphasizes the analysis and interpretation of data to give students a feel for how data interpretation is related to the methods by which the information was obtained. The book includes lists of key concepts, chapter exercises, topic boxes, and more