This textbook is specifically designed to give criminology and law students the elements of social statistics. Using examples entirely from criminology, law and justice research, the authors begin with simple mathematical notation and manipulation and work up through: } definitions of major terms } reading of graphs, charts and tables } theoretical basis of statistics, with discussions of probability, sampling and hypothesis testing. Only when the student has a firm mastery of these basic tools do the authors present some of the basic statistical techniques most commonly used in criminal justice research such as t-tests, correlations, simple regression, ANOVA and measures of association.