Understanding Statistics - A One Day Introductory Course
Dates:
12th Sept 2011
6th March 2012
Duration: 1 day (9.30am - 4:45pm)
Level: Introductory
Course Fee: £175 (£125 for those from educational institutions)
CCSR offer 5 free places to research staff and students within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester.
Course Leader: Pamela Campanelli and Kingsley Purdam
Introduction
This course is about understanding the statistics in social policy reports and behind the software packages. It is an opportunity for participants to ask that the basic statistical questions they have always wanted to ask.
This course focuses on basic statistical concepts such as: the four levels of measurement, measures of central tendency (median, mean, and mode), measures of dispersion (percentiles, variance, standard deviation, and standard error), confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, design effects and the issue of causality. These skills allow participants to interpret and evaluate existing research findings within the remit of basic statistics. The course is composed of a combination of lectures and practicals.
Course Objectives
The course will provide students with the expertise required to evaluate the meaning, robustness and generalisability of basic statistical research findings.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course the participants will have will have:
- Developed their understanding of basic statistical terms and concepts
- Examined and critiqued the use of basic statistics in reports and articles
- Understood the distinction between descriptive and inferential statistics
- Explored the meaning of differences when comparing statistics
- Increased their awareness about the issue of causality
Course Organisation
Dr. Pamela Campanelli teaches this course. She is a Survey Methods Consultant, Chartered Statistician and Chartered Scientist. In addition to her consultancy and research work, she regularly teaches short courses on a number of topics in survey research, such as questionnaire design, cognitive interviewing, multi-item scale development, survey implementation, survey sampling and survey analysis.
*Please bring a calculator with a square root function