Student Affairs by the Numbers: Quantitative Research and Statistics for Professionals by Rishi Sriram (review)

At a time when data and accountability measures are becoming increasingly prevalent in student affairs, quantitative literacy is an essential tool for analyzing and improving student support structures and experiences. Too often, however, the necessary skills for quantitative research and analysis are buried in inaccessible statistics textbooks filled with arcane mathematical models and examples that do not connect to higher education and the work of student affairs. Rishi Sriram's new book, Student Affairs by the Numbers, does away with the language and mathematics that shroud statistics in an incomprehensible fog, and he provides the building blocks for student affairs professionals to develop their own quantitative toolkits. This well-organized book is a much needed, applied statistics text with accessible language for students and practitioners to make use of statistics in their work. Each chapter begins with a scenario encountered in student affairs, which helps to ground that chapter's content into exploring these cases in applicable contexts.

Sriram presents three major sections in the book, each subsequent section building on the ideas presented in the former. The first few chapters make the argument for quantitative analysis in student affairs and describe fundamental ideas such as research paradigms and basic research design. Sriram uses the metaphor of fast thinking versus slow thinking throughout the book to distinguish between intuition, or thinking fast, and reasoned decision-making based on empirical data, or thinking slow. Empirical research, particularly quantitative research for the purposes of this book, is situated as one of several methods for thinking slow and challenging the built-in assumptions of thinking fast that may not serve students best.

The second section provides a strong overview of classical test theory and survey design while remaining consistently grounded in how these concepts are applicable to student affairs professionals. Sriram discusses items, scales, validity, and reliability sequentially in a step-by-step process for prospective researchers to follow. Readers may choose to create and pilot a scale while they are reading the chapter, as suggested by Sriram, or they may use these chapters as references as they design a survey. While this section provides an excellent road map, little space is devoted to psychometrics, so additional information is likely necessary for a fully rigorous survey.

The final section introduces descriptive and inferential statistics along with the most popular methods of quantitative analysis, namely multiple regression, ANOVA, logistic regression, and factor analysis. This section dispenses with the complicated jargon and mathematics of statistics to present the essential information needed to analyze quantitative data. Not only does Sriram clearly describe how to conduct the models and interpret the results, the author lays out a simple typology of the types of questions the methods are suited to answer. Exploring relationships between variables, comparing groups, predicting groups, and analyzing structure are the four questions Sriram identifies as answerable through quantitative research. The simplicity and clarity cut through any potential confusion as to the utility of statistics in education research and student affairs practice.

Therein lies the main contribution of this book. For new or even established researchers, quantitative research can seem cloudy and nonintuitive. Scholar practitioners may not be inherently averse to asking quantitative style questions, but without a solid grounding in statistics, even developing initial research questions may be difficult. Sriram's reassuring, accessible writing style tackles the road blocks one by one until quantitative analysis is no longer a mystery in the eyes of the reader.

An example of Sriram's methodical, applied, and sometimes humorous approach to teaching statistics comes at the beginning of the third section. "I hate averages," (p. 103) Sriram writes midway through a book arguing the merits of quantitative analysis. While averages are of course extremely useful and even essential, Sriram here is decrying the tendency for student affairs offices to collect enormous amounts of data with great analytic potential, then calculate the averages and make conclusions based solely on this measure. The...