Normality

Describes the selection, design, theory, and application of tests for normality. Covers robust estimation, test power, and univariate and multivariate normality. Contains tests ofr multivariate normality and coordinate-dependent and invariant approaches.

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal.

Table of contents

This book is about state socialism, not as a political system, but as an "ecosystem" of interactions between the state and the citizens it sought to control. It includes case studies that demonstrate how the major ideological principles of socialism translated into motives guiding people's lives. This unique post-revisionist study focuses on people's lives and experiences rather than political systems. The studies are grouped around three common elements—socialist labor, the new socialist man, and the socialist way of life. Using first-hand accounts, the authors find minute deviations from the norms that eventually lead to renegotiation of the norms themselves. Focusing on routines, not extremes, they present socialism in its "normal" state. The volume demonstrates different national strategies for dealing with the past in the post-socialist world. Studies of the socialist past may strive to be objective, but their messages tend to be complex. Rather than arriving at one truth about the nature of socialism, this volume explores the many ways people have survived the system.

How do you define good mental health? This controversial, counterintuitive, and altogether fascinating book argues that "psychological normality" is neither a desirable nor an acceptable standard. Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health is a groundbreaking work, the first book-length study to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. Its author, Dr. Steven James Bartlett, musters compelling evidence and careful analysis to challenge the paradigm accepted by mental health theorists and practitioners, a paradigm that is not only wrong, but can be damaging to those to whom it is applied—and to society as a whole. In this bold, multidisciplinary work, Bartlett critiques the presumed standard of normality that permeates contemporary consciousness. Showing that the current concept of mental illness is fundamentally unacceptable because it is scientifically unfounded and the result of flawed thinking, he argues that adherence to the gold standard of psychological normality leads to nothing less than cultural impoverishment.

Who amongst us truly know who we are? We may think we have a good and robust understanding of who we are, of what makes us tick, our likes and dislikes. You see, we may well be a product of our thoughts at times, where our perceptions and sense of sensibility conflict and/or or agree with the opinions, views and desires of our fellow man. However, until we're able to fully understand the concise constituents that result in the presentation of our fluid normality, we have nothing but subjectivity upon which to assess the validity of our presenting personality. It is only at the point that our own personal insight assumes its rightful place amongst and amidst our collective psyche that we begin to understand in totality the complexity of particulate and disease state originators which either directly or indirectly impose a presentation or mirroring effect upon what we believe to be our own and unique fluid normality.

Beyond Normality covers a broad range of subjects—everything from human behavior, to feminism and sex, to child rearing, to violence, to drugs and alcohol, to changes in society and the oppressions of modern life. From family orientation, to religion and mankind consciousness. Readers are asked to consider Beyond Normality as a “modern guide for complete internal harmony”. Numerous themes run throughout this work, the most persistent and prevalent is the belief on the growing disconnect between what is natural and what has come to be thought of as normal. There is, in the author’s view, a great deal that is wrong with modern society, and much of it stems from our insistence on shielding ourselves from the rigors of the natural order of things.

This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama.