BASS Sociology and Philosophy

Year of entry: 2024

Course unit details:
Applied Statistics for Social Scientists

Course unit fact file
Unit code SOST20142
Credit rating 20
Unit level Level 1
Teaching period(s) Semester 2
Available as a free choice unit? Yes

Overview

The main topics to be covered are: 

  • Data exploration and visualization using R
  • Descriptive statistics 
  • Modelling with Continuous Data 
  • Modelling with categorical Variables 

Aims

The aims of this course are for each student to achieve:  

  • an introductory to data cleaning and exploration  
  • an understanding of basic statistics tests  
  • an understanding of multivariate statistical analysis  
  • an ability to use statistical software R  

Learning outcomes

  • be able to import and export data in R  
  • be able to prepare data in R  
  • be able to produce visualisations of data  
  • be able to understand and run descriptive statistics in R  
  • be able to understand and run a battery of test of hypothesis in R  
  • be able to understand and run a variety of statistical models in R  

Teaching and learning methods

Lectures, practicals and coursework.  

Please note the information in scheduled activity hours are for guidance only and may change.  

Assessment methods

Method Weight
Written assignment (inc essay) 75%
Set exercise 25%

Feedback methods

Feed-back on individual based essay 

Recommended reading

Agresti, A. (2018). Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences (5th ed.). Pearson. 

Fogarty, B. (2019). Quantitative Social Science Data with R. 

Hothorn, T., & Everitt, B. (2014). A handbook of statistical analyses using R (Third edition). CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.  

Landers, R. N. (2019). A step-by-step introduction to statistics for business. SAGE.  

Leon-Guerrero, A., & Frankfort-Nachmias, C. (2018). Essentials of social statistics for a diverse society (Third edition). SAGE. 

Wickham, H., & Grolemund, G. (2017). R for Data Science: import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. O’Reilly UK Ltd. 

Study hours

Scheduled activity hours
Lectures 20
Practical classes & workshops 8
Independent study hours
Independent study 172

Teaching staff

Staff member Role
Todd Hartman Unit coordinator

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