Phillips L.D. Bayesian statistics for social scientists

New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975. — 455 p.Over the past few years I have been encouraged by colleagues and students who knew of my interest in Bayesian statistics to write a book that would explain the Bayesian approach in reasonably simple language, and would serve as a practical guide to carrying out Bayesian analyses. This book is the result. It attempts to introduce Bayesian statistics to the professional psychologist, sociologist, educational researcher, or economist who seeks alternatives to significance tests, who wishes to find out more than that his results are not due to chance and who wants to know how likely his statistical hypotheses are now that the data are in. The book should also be of interest to the student of the social sciences who has had some exposure to statistics and who is interested in learning the Bayesian viewpoint. But the reader I mainly had in mind when writing this book is the social science student new to statistics. Thus, it assumes that the reader has no previous acquaintance with statistics, and has perhaps half-forgotten his school mathematics. Depending on the pace of the course, this book could serve as a textbook for a statistics class for which the total number of timetabled hours is at least 45.Introduction
Quantifying prior opinion
Probability Laws
Revising opinion
Functions and their graphs
Distributions of opinion
Dealing with data
Inference