Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference

I bought this book as a companion to a psychology course that I'm doing (by the author). Really useful for me as it goes into more depth on the topics covered in lectures. Quite easy to read and runs through the history of science covering the main approaches and methods for carrying out scientific investigation (all relevant to today). Also arrived after only a couple of days of purchase which was great.

I found this book was a really good easy read that kept me interested throughout. I would recommend it for anyone interested in understanding science in general and its role in psychology, but specifically for anyone that might be struggling with grasping the statistics on which experimental psychology rely upon.A really good book!

Good read. Helped me with my psychology assignments

Good info but formatting could have been better.

This is a really boring and poorly written book. The university will advise you to buy this for your first year of Psychology - don't bother. You will look at it once when writing the assignment for this module and realise it is pointless.

needed it for psychology in uni .

This relatively brief but comprehensive book is was extremely helpful throughout my MSc course and to this day. The initial chapters on Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos provide an accessible way into thinking about theory testing and progression. Chapters 3 and 4 are the real heart of this book, however. These really set the record straight on what a p-value actually means by setting the notion in a broader statistical and philosophical context. Since reading similar material in other textbooks I have yet to find one with the clarity and imagination of this author - Neyman-Pearson statistics is genuinely starting to make sense to me now and, as the author intends, its limitations are becoming more apparent. I recommend this book to anyone whose study or work involves inferential statistics.

So far it’s exceeded expectations. It’s a relatively easy read and covers all the bases of philosophy of science as related to psychology.