Intended Audience

This textbook was created as a practical, step-by-step guide for how to complete statical tests commonly used by psychology students in the program jamovi. The author created this guide for use in the senior capstone psychology lab courses at her university. As such, this guide assumes that students already have a solid foundation of statistical knowledge. For example, students at the author’s university take two statistics courses in psychology and a psychology research methods course before their capstone psychology lab courses. The goal of this textbook is to help students 1) execute the statistical test they have already learned using the open-source statistical software jamovi, and 2) report the results of those statistical tests in APA style.

Using this Guide

This textbook is intended to be used as a reference guide as students analyze studies and write results sections. If, at times, information in different chapters is redundant, this is intentional; it is not assumed that students will read the text from beginning to end. For example, if a student is conducting a one-way ANOVA, I hope they will jump to chapter 8 without having to read chapter 7 on t-tests first (though I do hope students read Chapter 1 Introduction to Our Data and Chapter 2 Jamovi Basics before diving into specific analyses).

A note on the language used in this textbook: throughout the guide, I generally use the term “independent variable” for any predictor variable. Technically, a true independent variable is a variable that is manipulated and not measured. Most of the analysis examples in this guide are based on hypothetical survey data (measured variables), and therefore, our predictors are not true independent variables. However, most students are more familiar with independent variable and dependent variable terminology rather than predictor variable and outcome variable, so I chose to use IV and DV in this guide.

What is jamovi?

Jamovi is an open-source statistical software that is free for all to download and use. Jamovi’s goal is to “offer a statistical platform which is intuitive to use, and can provide the latest developments in statistical methodology”. In Chapter 2 Jamovi Basics, this guide will review how to download and get started with jamovi. This guide was created using jamovi 2.5.6.