Foundations in Applied Statistics (Series 3)

BeginnersUpdated

The SSRMC Administrator will make all bookings for this module. If you would like to follow the module you must complete the SSRMC skills audit by 4pm on Thursday 9 October before a place can be booked for you.

If you have already completed the audit you may have had a place booked for you by your Department. Please check this by typing your CRSid into the search box at the very top right of this page, hitting the enter key then clicking on your name. This will show the module(s) you are booked for, as applicable.

This module is part of the Social Science Research Methods Centre training programme which is a shared platform for providing research students with a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research methods skills that are relevant across the social sciences.

This foundational course is for graduate students who have no prior training in statistics.

Topics covered include: the notion of variables and how they are measured; ways of describing the central tendency and the dispersion of a variable; and the principles of hypothesis testing and statistical significance. The course also introduces students to the software R. Each session consists of a lecture part, and a computer lab part with exercises in R.

• Mphil and PhD students from participating departments taking the Social Science Research Methods Centre training programme as part of their research degree

• You must have completed the SSRMC Skills Audit before the first session
• You must have a University Information Services (Computing) Desktop Services password (http://www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/linkpages/newcomers)
• You must have access to CamTools
• Read "Introduction to R: http://www.cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf" before (!) the first session.
• If you want to work with your own laptop, install R and Rstudio beforehand.

Number of sessions: 4

• Session 1: Variables, Measurement, Summary Statistics, Using R Session
• Session 2: Variables, Measurement, Summary Statistics, Using R Session (cont'd.)
• Session 3: Samples, Statistical Models, Significance Tests, Reproducibility
• Session 4: Samples, Statistical Models, Significance Tests, Reproducibility (cont'd.)

Presentations, demonstrations and practicals

R on MCS

• One online assessment [optional, dependent upon department]

The main textbook is:

• Field, A. et al (2012) Discovering Statistics using R. London: Sage.

You should also read

• Introduction to R: http://www.cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf

The textbook by Field (2012) discusses all themes that are covered by this course. Most other introductory statistics textbooks have similar introductory chapters.

Three useful textbooks providing more detailed coverage of the essential basics of statistics are:

• Howell, David C. (2007), Statistical Methods for Psychology. Belmont: Wadsworth (chapters 1 through 5)
• Levin, Jack and James Alan Fox (2003), Elementary Statistics in Social Research, Boston: Pearson (chapters 1 through 6)
• Smithson, Michael (2000), Statistics with Confidence London:Sage (chapters 1 through 6)

• To gain maximum benefits from the course it is important that students do not see this course in isolation from the other MPhil courses or research training they are taking.
• Responsibility lies with each student to consider the potential for their own research using methods common in fields of the social sciences that may seem remote. Ideally this task will be facilitated by integration of the SSRMC with discipline-specific courses in their departments and through reading and discussion.

Four sessions of two hours.

Once a week for four weeks.