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Interpreting Economic and Social Data is a compendium of the concepts needed to describe and analyze empirical data in the social sciences. It aims to set the record straight about the foundations of descriptive statistics and offers a revealing look behind the scenes of commonly used methods. It shows how to deal with ratios, probabilities, and index numbers, together with many topics that border on other quantitative subjects like accounting, mathematics, econometrics and geography.

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"Interpreting Economic and Social Data" aims at rehabilitating the descriptive function of socio-economic statistics, bridging the gap between today´s statistical theory on one hand, and econometric and mathematical models of society on the other. It does this by offering a deeper understanding of data and methods with surprising insights, the result of the author´s six decades of teaching, consulting and involvement in statistical surveys. The author challenges many preconceptions about aggregation, time series, index numbers, frequency distributions, regression analysis and probability, nudging statistical theory in a different direction. "Interpreting Economic and Social Data" also links statistics with other quantitative fields like accounting and geography. This book is aimed at students and professors in business, economics demographic and social science courses, and in general, at users of socio-economic data, requiring only an acquaintance with elementary statistical theory.

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Developments in Socio-Economic Statistics.- From the Facts in Society to Socio-Economic Data.- Structure and Nature of Socio-Economic Data: The Aggregates.- Ratios in the Social Sciences.- Interpreting Longitudinal Data, Part 1; Looking to the Past.- Longitudinal Analysis, Part 2; Looking to the Future.- Longitudinal Analysis, Part 3; Index Numbers.- Cross Sectional Analysis in One Dimension.- Cross Sectional Analysis in More Than One Dimension.- Socio-Economic Statistics and Probability.- The Interface between Statistics and Accounting.- Socio-Economic Statistics and Geography.

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