The Analysis of Contingency Tables

For several years now my book Analysing Qualitative Data has been in need of revision. Since it was first published in 1961, and in part perhaps because of it, a great deal of new and interesting work on the analysis of contingency tables has been published. Mr. Brian Everitt kindly undertook to do the revision but, when he came to review recent literature, it became apparent that a mere renovation of the original text would not be enough; the amount of new work was not only extensive but also made obsolete many of the older methods. In consequence, and with the agreement of the publishers, it was decided that the revised version should in effect be a new book. That it is so is not strikingly evident in the first two chapters of the present text which, by way of introduction, cover old ground. Thereafter, the increased scope of new methods becomes abundantly apparent. This can be illustrated by a single example. When the Iiterature up to 1961 was reviewed the big disappointment was the paucity and inadequacy of methods then available for the analysis of multidimensional tables, and they are the rule rather than the exception in research work in the social sciences.