Preface

These are the course notes for PSYCH 710, the second semester of graduate statistics in the UW-Madison Department of Psychology. These notes are cloned from the incredible book developed by Tobi Gerstenberg for Psych 252 at Stanford, and lightly adapted to fit the needs of the course. This course offers an introduction to advanced topics in statistics with the focus of understanding the kind of data we see in the behavioral and social sciences. The aim is for statistical concepts to be tightly interwoven with the practice of psychological research, where we build models and work with data in R. The centerpiece of the course is to achieve a deep understanding of the linear mixed-effects model, which we will approach from both a frequentist and Bayesian perspective. Along the way, other topics will be visited (and revisited), including notions of power, measurement, non-parametric statistics, and model comparison.

License and citation

This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license. If you find these materials helpful for your work, please cite the original book:

@book{gerstenberg2022methods,
  title = {Statistical methods for the behavioral and social sciences},
  author = {Tobias Gerstenberg},
  year = {2022},
  url = {https://psych252.github.io/psych252book/}
}