A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed

"Preface I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like. { Artemus Ward (from a newspaper advertisement, 1863)Our title is taken from the seminal work of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (1904, M. Friedlander, Trans.). This monumental contribution was written as a three-volume letter to a student and was an attempt by Maimonides to reconcile his Aristotelian philosophical views with those of Jewish law. In an analogous way, this book tries to reconcile the areas of statistics and the behavioral (and related social and biomedical) sciences through the standards for ethical practice, de ned as being in accord with the accepted rules or standards for right conduct that govern a discipline. The standards for ethical practice are what we try to instill in students through the methodology courses we o er, with particular emphasison the graduate and undergraduate statistics sequence generally required in all of the sciences. It is our hope that the principal general education payo for competent statistics instruction is an increase in people's ability to be critical and ethical consumers and producers of the statistical reasoning and analyses they will face over the course of their careers. Maimonides intended his Guide for an educated readership, with the ideas concealed from the masses. He writes in the introduction: \A sensible man should not demand of me, or hope that when we mention a subject, we shall make a complete exposition of it." In a related way, this book is not intended to teach the principles of statistics"--

Lawrence Hubert is the Lyle H. Lanier Professor of Psychology and a professor of statistics and educational psychology at the University of Illinois. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Educational Research Association. Dr. Hubert has been a recipient of honors, including the Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association. His research focuses on the development of exploratory methods for data representation in the behavioral sciences, emphasizing cluster analysis, spatially oriented multidimensional scaling techniques, and network representation procedures.

Howard Wainer is a Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and American Educational Research Association. Dr. Wainer has been a recipient of several honors, including the Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association and the Career Achievement Award from the National Council on Measurement in Education. His research encompasses the use of graphical methods for data analysis and communication, robust statistical methodology, and the development and application of generalizations of item response theory.