There is a dual purpose to this book. First, we want to make available in a single volume an exposition of the principles and procedures of contrast analysis that have applications in a wide range of fields in the behavioral and social sciences. Second, we want to introduce to the community of researchers, teachers of research methods, and graduate students in these fields a series of newly developed concepts, measures, and indices that permit a wider and more useful application of contrast analysis. In short, this book is intended as both a text and a contribution to new knowledge in the area of contrast analysis.

Although one of us might be viewed as a mathematical statistician (DBR), our approach in this book is intuitive, concrete, and arithmetic rather than rigorously or formally mathematical. The statistical examples we employ are in all cases hypothetical, constructed specifically to illustrate the logical bases of the computational procedures. The numbers are neater than real-life examples tend to be, and there are fewer numbers in any single example than we would find in an actual data set. All of this material has been pretested in our own courses, with the objective of showing how practical, convenient, and inviting it is to use this approach to contrast analysis.