Course description
This course will provide a theoretical background and practical experience to statistics for psychology and other behavioral sciences. Statistics are the tools we use to summarize and describe the world around us and to explore the causal processes at work. Understanding statistics and how they are used and misused is vital to assimilating information as an informed citizen, as well as pursuing a career in the behavioral sciences or similar fields. In this course will cover topics including: principles of measurement, measures of central tendency and variability, probability and distributions, correlation and regression, hypothesis testing, t-tests, analysis of variance, and chi-square tests. You will learn and use a computer program, SPSS, to help you understand and perform select statistical analyses.
Learning Outcome
At the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Apply statistical information in scholarly research, and the practical skills to apply this knowledge in the course of pursuing their own research objectives.
- Explain the statistical procedures and tests used most often in psychological science
- Use SPSS to independently analyze data for decision making
- Apply statistical tools for managerial decisions
Course Content
- Introduction: Why Statistics
- Descriptive statistics
- Lab (SPSS Intro & Math Review)
- Frequency Distributions
- Central Tendency
- Distribution of Sample Means
- Probability
- Regression
Compulsory Reading Materials
- Privitera, G.J. (2015). Essential Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. Sage
- Howell, D.C. (2014). Fundamental statistics for the behavioral sciences (8th edition).