ABSTRACT
You may be a little relieved to read that this book does not seek to make statisticians of its readers. Instead, it seeks to ensure that students understand key concepts in statistical analysis and have the knowledge and skills to analyse the data they collect. Too often criminology students are wary of statistical analysis, so with this in mind this chapter provides a step-by-step guide to basic quantitative analysis. The chapter focuses on fundamental processes such as descriptive statistics, t-tests and Chi-square tests, and provides a guide to inputting data into SPSS, choosing and running the appropriate tests and interpreting the output. However, we encourage you to consider whether the data you have would really benefit from quantitative analysis and we hope that by reading this chapter you will be more equipped to answer this question. It may be that you simply require straightforward graphical representations of your data, and this can be done quite easily in programs such as Excel.
