Student Affairs by the Numbers

Book excerpt: Student Affairs by the Numbers aims to be the go-to book for student affairs professionals who want to know the basics of quantitative research and statistics for their work. Books on assessment in student affairs tend to discuss processes more than research design and statistics. Most books on statistics share too much information for practitioners, overwhelming them and making it difficult to discern what they need to know. Since these books do not use examples from student affairs, it is even more difficult for practitioners to connect with new concepts.Student Affairs professionals need to know how to design a study, collect data, analyze data, interpret results, and present the results in an understandable manner. This book will begin by establishing the need for these skills in student affairs and then quickly move to how to develop a research culture, how to conduct research, how to understand statistics, and concluding with how to change our research/assessment behaviors in order to make higher education better for students.