Reading and Understanding Statistics

BeginnersUpdated

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 module is for students who don’t plan to use quantitative methods in their own research, but who need to be able to read and understand published research using quantitative methods. You will learn how to interpret graphs, frequency tables and multivariate regression results, and to ask intelligent questions about sampling, methods and statistical inference. The module is aimed at complete beginners, with no prior knowledge of statistics or quantitative methods.

• Mphil and PhD students from participating departments taking the SSRMC training programme as part of their research degree
• This module is aimed at complete beginners, with no prior knowledge of statistics or quantitative methods

• A willingness to learn.

Number of sessions: 4

• Background to quantitative research: what is it, how is it different from other kinds of empirical research, and where do data come from?
• Statistical inference and hypothesis testing
• Correlation and tests of bivariate association
• Multivariate analysis

• To enable students to understand the fundamentals of academic papers without recourse to formal statistical theory.

• Students will learn how to interpret graphs, frequency tables and multivariate regression results, and to ask intelligent questions about sampling, methods and statistical inference.

Presentations, demonstrations and practicals

• One final online multiple-choice test

• The course is not based around a textbook. “Thinking Statistically” by Uri Bram provides a concise and non-technical introduction to the topics covered; Alan Bryman’s “Social Research Methods” goes beyond the material covered in this module, but Part One of the book is well worth reading.

• 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.

• Elements of Social Science Research
• Statistics