Abstract
Abstract The basic purpose of this chapter is to provide a general overview of the fundamentals of statistical reasoning and analysis that are particularly applicable to the evaluation of human services practice. The audience for this chapter is assumed to include social workers and other behavioral practitioners who may have had a course in statistics that is but a distant and regrettable memory and practitioners who have not had a course in basic statistics. While it offers practitioners considerably enhanced opportunities to evaluate practice, the availability of highly sophisticated and user-friendly statistical software over the last decade brings with it the risk of extremely erroneous findings and conclusions that are ultimately far more detrimental to empirically based practice than the profession of honest uncertainty. In this chapter I will review the critical assumptions that are embedded in the application and interpretation of some of the more popular statistical tests employed in the evaluation of human services practice, as well as some of the common errors one can make in test selection and interpretation. Although this chapter will be more conceptual than mathematical, I will walk the reader through some equations essential to statistical reasoning. First, however, I will review some fundamental concepts and terminology.
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