Quantitative Anthropology

Quantitative Anthropology Book Summary

Quantitative Anthropology: A Workbook contributes an anthropological perspective to quantitative methods. The book's authors address characteristics of quantitative data, entering and manipulating data in SPSS, graphical displays, distributions and measures of central tendency and dispersion, and including hypothesis testing with both parametric and nonparametric statistical tests. Increasingly complex exercises build on cumulative learning from chapter to chapter and stress the application of methods beyond coursework. The focus of the manual is on univariate statistical analysis, and the book is written to be accessible to higher level undergraduate students and graduate students in all fields of anthropology. Uses anthropological examples (from the subdisciplines of sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology) to illustrate quantitative data techniques Integrates quantitative techniques with theoretical fluency, encouraging the reader to make connections between Big Picture questions in anthropology and the methods used to address those questions Focuses on the practical use of Excel and SPSS to apply quantitative methods to anthropological contexts Includes exercises in both parametric and nonparametric inferential statistics, as well as descriptive statistics