STA302 Introduction to Statistics in Social Sciences

[3–0, 3 cr.]

This course is an introduction to statistical analysis for the social and behavioral sciences. It covers both descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics covers ways of representing data graphically, measures of central tendency and dispersion, the normal distribution and other types of standard scores as well as an introduction to probability and sampling. The inferential statistical tests addressed in the course cover ratio, ordinal and categorical variables. The course deals with inferential tests involving one, two or more means, proportions, and correlations. It also considers the basic analysis of variance models (ANOVA), linear regression models and non-parametric tests such as chi-square. Students will develop sufficient conceptual understanding to select from a variety of statistical tests appropriately. In addition, students will learn to use a statistical software package to enter data and conduct a range of statistical analyses.