This open resources textbook contains 10 Units that describe and explain the main concepts in statistical analysis of psychological data (managing data, measures of central tendency, measures of spread, correlations, simple linear regression). In addition to conceptual descriptions and explanations of the basic analyses for descriptive statistics, this textbook also explains how to conduct those analyses with common statistical software (Excel) and open-source free software (R). This book is directed to undergraduates studying basic statistics, especially basic statistics in psychological research.

The syllabus for PSYC 211: Psychological Research Methods, as taught at James Madison University.

This fourth edition (published in 2019) was co-authored by Rajiv S. Jhangiani (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Carrie Cuttler (Washington State University), and Dana C. Leighton (Texas A&M University—Texarkana) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Revisions throughout the current edition include changing the chapter and section numbering system to better accommodate adaptions that remove or reorder chapters; continued reversion from the Canadian edition; general grammatical edits; replacement of “he/she” to “they” and “his/her” to “their”; removal or update of dead links; embedded videos that were not embedded; moved key takeaways and exercises from the end of each chapter section to the end of each chapter; a new cover design. In addition, the following revisions were made to specific chapters:

The purpose of this project was to create a set of ancillary materials for the open textbook Research Methods in Psychology, a textbook intended to be used for psychology research methods courses. At the start of this grant, the textbook was available through the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library (open.lib.umn.edu/psychologyresearchmethods/) and could be found in most open material repositories. Since this grant was proposed, however, a more recent version of the text has been released by Price, Jhangiani, Chiang, Leighton, and Cuttler (https://opentext.wsu.edu/carriecuttler/). The resources developed for this grant can be used for the new edition of the text, although they were written for the earlier version.