Statistics for Research (Short Course)

Course overview

This short course provides an introduction to a range of quantitative research methods, and basic statistical procedures typically used in investigating psychology, social sciences, community demographics, and medicine.

The course will focus on how to define and analyse data, how to use SPSS (a statistical analysis software program), and how to test whether a difference or relationship is ‘significant’.

The course is designed to take account of the fact people vary in the knowledge they currently hold about statistics, and that they have a range of previous experience. For that reason, the course is modular, so you can decide to attend one, several, or all of the sessions.

When conducting research, we often need statistics to tell us about the impact of our observations. If we find relationships or differences, we want to know the likelihood that the outcome was because of specific factors, or whether they were due to chance – statistics tell us that.

Before we do that, we need to understand a little more about the data we are attempting to analyse. We need to describe what kind of data we have; sometimes it may be numerical, at other times it may define categories, or it may reflect how something is ranked or ordered. Once we know that we can proceed to analyse those data.

Such analyses are made considerably easier by a range of software programs; we will focus on one called SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Once we get the hang of that program there are a number of tests that we can employ to examine our data. Some are relatively simple; others are rather more complex.

We will look at a range of tests that are used. As we will see, the choice of test will depend on a range of criteria; we will learn what those criteria are. We also explore how we communicate the outcomes of our research, including graphical presentation and report writing.