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Preface
Is this book for you?
This book is a guide for individuals who are making their first
attempts at applying multivariate analysis tools to community datasets. This means that
although the analysis tools are described in what I hope is a fairly comprehensive manner,
the organization of the book, instructions for how to run the analyses, and the examples
are all geared toward the beginner. You will find this book helpful if any of the
following apply:
- you are unfamiliar with multivariate statistics in general
- you are unfamiliar with community datasets in particular
- you are unfamiliar with the PC-ORD software
- you are not satisfied with the explanations given in the multivariate references you
already have
What’s in this book
The structure of this book parallels the ten step analysis process I
propose. The first couple of chapters in Step 1 are intended to get you ready to conduct
the analysis—refreshing your statistical background and clarifying your analysis
objectives. The four chapters of Step 2 help you get your dataset ready for analysis using
the PC-ORD™ software. Two more chapters in Step 3 help you structure your matrices to
address your analysis objectives. The seven chapters of Step 4 focus on exploring and
manipulating your dataset to make sure your data mean what you think. Finally, the three
chapters in Step 5 prepare you to select your analysis tools.
The twelve chapters in Step 6 each focus on a different analysis
tool, allowing you to focus your attention on those you wish to apply. For each procedure,
I provide a conceptual description of what it is good for, what it actually does, what it
means, what you need in order to run it, what you get in the output, what you should know
about its strengths and weaknesses, how to run it in PC-ORD
version 6, and when you might use such a tool. There are certainly more ways to use the
tools discussed in the book than the few ways presented here, but hopefully the
descriptions provided will get you thinking about the application of these tools.
Finally, Steps 7 and 8 briefly reinforce the need to seek
confirmation in your results before turning to interpretation in Step 9 and communication
in Step 10. |