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Reading and Understanding Regression Tables

It is increasingly common to see regression tables in the political science literature. While the best way to learn how to understand regression analysis is to take a class, it may be the case that you confront the tables before you get the chance to do that.  Fortunately, there are a number of resources on the web that can give you a very basic understanding of how regression works and how to interpret regression results.

Eventually, we hope to post more specific information about interpreting statistics on this website. For now the resources below may suffice. Especially recommended is Engelhardt and Stugel’s “The Basics of Multiple Regression”.

Resources

Articles

• Dallal, Gerard E. “How to Read the Output from Simple Linear Regression Analsyes” in The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice.
• Sykes, Alan O., “An Introduction to Regression Analysis”, The Inaugural Coase Lecture.
• Engelhardt Gary and Therese Stukel. “The Basics of Multiple Regression” in Factors Related to Wages in the Current Population Survey. Part of Dartmouth’s Electronic Bookshelf on Statistics.

Website

On the History of Statistics:

Portraits and Bibliographies of Statisticians: http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/jpitocch/biostatshist.html

Figures from the History of Probability and Statistics: http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/Figures.htm

On Statistics as a Conceptual Field

Gapminder, an alternative resource on thinking about statistics: http://www.gapminder.org/

Videos

Arthur Benjamin on Statistics and the Digital Age (courtesy of TED.com)

@ Monmouth College

Check back here for more information in the future!

updated August 3, 2017 – MN