Appropriate for advanced courses on experimental design or analysis, applied statistics, or analysis of variance taught in departments of psychology, education, statistics, business, and other social sciences, the book is also ideal for practicing researchers in these disciplines. A prerequisite of undergraduate statistics is assumed. An Instructor's Solutions Manual is available to those who adopt the book for classroom use.
This book is a resource and reference book rather than a book you read from cover to cover. However, during the course of my Ph.D. studies I probably read every word at some point. The authors explain very technical details with some mathematics but a good theoretical discussion as well, and even if the mathematics can get overwhelming at times, the explanations were understandable. This book was especially helpful to me in working out which test of the family of ANOVAs, Chi Squares, or t-tests and their parametric versions was appropriate given the particular tests I wanted to apply, and in understanding whether the results were meaningful or not in a practical sense. A newer edition has been released and I`ve found this book so useful that I`ve bought the new edition in order to keep up with some advances in the field of statistics. It really helps to be proficient in statistical software, such as SPSS, so that concepts can be checked for oneself to help learn.
Full disclosure: I cannot speak to Chapters 15 or 16, as they were not part of my course. It was an advanced graduate level course on analysis of variance.
This is probably the clearest and most thorough statistics textbook I've ever come across. It tackles analysis of variance from the ground up, presenting it in terms of the statistical model comparisons that underlie stats packages like SPSS or SAS (and the theory that built them) and in this way demonstrating the ultimate cohesion of all analyses, for any design, based on the general linear model. Maxwell and Delaney write with impressive patience and clarity on increasingly challenging topics-- each one is broken down in turn and shown to be a logical and mathematical extension of the basic concepts. Examples are used throughout to illustrate concepts, and exercises are given at the end of every chapter. Moreover, syntax for stats packages is occasionally provided.
Though the course was heck of tough, it was also incredibly rewarding, and this textbook perfectly complemented the lectures and assignments to ease my understanding. I had only two small complaints about the text. First, that it grows a bit repetitive in extensions from lower- to higher-order designs of the same type; while I understand they were trying to be as explicit as possible, it felt redundant at times. Second, especially further on, that some sections involved drastic leaps in complexity certain to flummox readers with a lesser grasp on the materials. I came to this book with several upper-level statistics courses under my belt, but the book is meant to be used with undergraduates as well. Even so, the optional endnotes regularly flummoxed me, and I found myself wishing they were written with just a touch more consideration for readers without mathematical backgrounds-- I was terribly interested by the ideas, but often could not follow the maths.
Aside from those two details, however, I found an unexpected enjoyment in learning from this book, and would recommend it as required reading (or at least required owning, for reference) for any graduate student in psychology.
It is a great book, but coming from a technical background I had a challenge to really have a deep understanding of it, classes help actually to discuss it with other classmates.