ODU Psychology Prof Richard Landers Publishes Statistics Textbook

May 10, 2013

Richard Landers

Old Dominion University psychology professor Richard N. Landers has crossed disciplines to publish a textbook on statistics for business.

"A Step-by-Step Introduction to Statistics for Business" is now available for sale through Sage Publications and Amazon. Released in April, it is an "essential introduction to statistics for business students," according to the 440-page book's description.

"In a clear and engaging way, Richard Landers guides the reader through the vital role statistics play in the business decision-making process and carefully explains and demonstrates how they are applied in practice," the description states. "The book covers everything from collecting data to summarizing your findings and presenting them. It also revisits all the basic math skills required to work with data and statistics effectively, with step-by-step screenshot illustrations in both Excel and IBM SPSS."

A unique aspect of the book is that it has a comprehensive companion website that hosts video tutorials on using Excel and IBM SPSS. Also, Landers has included an online dataset generator that helps instructors create data sets for their classes and allows students to make their own problem sets with fully worked solutions to test themselves.

Sage Publications approached Landers about writing the textbook because he is on the executive committee of the Organizational Behavior division of the Academy of Management (a professional association for scholars of management and organizations), where he is responsible for coordinating all technology needs of the division.

Landers said writing a textbook has been an item on his "bucket list" since high school.

"They were looking for someone to create a student-centered one-semester introduction to statistics in business," he said. "I jumped on it."

While Landers hasn't taught statistics at ODU, he did so previously at the University of Minnesota and says his area of expertise - industrial/organizational psychology - is the application of psychological science to business, roughly corresponding to the studies of human resources and organizational behavior.

For more information about "A Step-by-Step Introduction to Statistics for Business," visit the Sage Publications website.