About QMSBR

Aims, authorship, citation, licences, and accessibility

What QMSBR is for and what each part covers, who maintains it, how to cite it, the licences it ships under, its accessibility, and how to use it in a course.

Contents

QMSBR—Quantitative Methods for Social and Behavioral Research—is a modular collection of chapters designed to support various quantitative and statistical courses. Its modular design serves several courses at once: each course chooses its own route through one canonical set of chapters whose identities and links stay stable, so a correction to a chapter improves every route that uses it. The chapters help readers make sense of quantitative studies, following how a study turns a question into evidence and a bounded answer. They also help readers carry out analyses in which design, statistical reasoning, interpretation, and reproducible computing stay connected.

Part One covers foundations, regression, and generalized linear models. It moves from research questions, data, and variation through estimation, testing, and group comparisons to computing with R and regression, and its first four chapters can be read without running R or SPSS. Part Two covers factor analysis and structural equation modeling: how observed responses represent latent variables, and how a measurement model is developed, specified, estimated, evaluated, and extended. Part Three is reserved for multilevel and longitudinal models and is not yet available. The reading approach the chapters share is set out on The Argument-Based Approach.

Author

Jinsong Chen
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
jinsong.chen@live.com

QMSBR is independently maintained. The affiliation identifies the author and does not imply institutional endorsement; QMSBR is not an official University website.

Citation

To cite the collection:

Chen, J. (2026). QMSBR: Quantitative Methods for Social and Behavioral Research. https://jinsong-chen.github.io/QMSBR/

To cite an individual chapter, cite it by its title and give its page address, for example:

Chen, J. (2026). Simple linear regression (Part One, Chapter 7). In QMSBR: Quantitative Methods for Social and Behavioral Research. https://jinsong-chen.github.io/QMSBR/part-one/chapter_07.html

Also cite the original datasets, software, and studies that an analysis uses.

Licences

Chapter text, figures, and site prose are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Original code is licensed under the MIT License. Simulated data created for QMSBR is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0.

Third-party items keep their own terms: the Chapter 1 student-outcome extract from the dataset released by Realinho and colleagues (UCI Machine Learning Repository, dataset 697; CC BY 4.0); the Chapters 2 and 13 secondary-school data derived from the UCI Student Performance dataset (Cortez, 2008; CC BY 4.0); and apa.csl, from the CSL styles collection (CC BY-SA 3.0). The R support pages carry their own licence and data register. Package datasets used in examples are loaded from their R packages and are not redistributed here.

The LICENSE file is the full statement of these terms.

Accessibility

Every chapter, part introduction, and concept reference is offered as an HTML page and a PDF. The PDFs pass automated PDF/UA-2 checks and include section headings in their tagged structure, figure descriptions and mathematical alternatives. These checks are accompanied by visual review; they do not cover every assistive technology or reading setup. The HTML page is the more flexible format: it provides a responsive layout, headings, search, descriptive link text, and selectable code, and the PDF suits printing and annotation. Figures carry alternative text, and text and link colours are chosen for readable contrast. A navigation entry for a unit that is not yet available is shown in a muted colour and marked as disabled, so it is not announced or reached as a working link.

To report an accessibility barrier, open an issue in the repository issue tracker or email jinsong.chen@live.com, naming the page and what got in the way.

Using QMSBR in a course

This site is canonical: it holds the current chapters, and courses consume it rather than keep copies of their own. Each course chooses its own route and sequence through the chapters. Course materials and assessment stay in the course system, such as Moodle, and a course links to the stable chapter pages, so its students always reach the current version of each chapter.

This site	The course system
The current chapters, part introductions, and concept references	The term schedule and weekly instructions
Stable chapter pages and their PDFs	Announcements and deadlines
The chapters’ own exercises	Classroom notes, assessment, feedback, and answer keys