Dr Ilya Sheynzon, COL 7.10

Compulsory for BSc Sociology students. Optional for BSc Human Resource Management and Employment Relations and the Diploma in Sociology. Also available to General Course students and as an outside option. This course cannot be taken with ST102 Elementary Statistical Theory, ST107 Quantitative Methods (Statistics) or ST108 Probability and Statistics for the Social Sciences.

An introduction to statistical methods and statistical reasoning, with particular reference to application in the social sciences. No prior knowledge of statistics is assumed.

The place of statistics in the social sciences. Descriptive statistics: levels of measurement. The summarization and presentation of data using graphic methods. The normal distribution. Basic ideas of sampling and statistical inference. Sampling from finite populations. The sampling distributions of proportions and means estimation and hypothesis testing. Testing goodness of fit. The measurement of association and correlation and simple tests of significance. Simple linear regression. Two-sample tests for means.

Lectures ST103:10 MT, 20 LT, 4 ST.

Classes ST103.A:  9 MT, 10 LT and 5 ST.

Written answers to set exercises are expected weekly. The exercise marks form part of the course assessment.

Each week a set of notes covering the lecture topics for that week will be distributed. These notes will provide a framework for further reading, and will indicate where further material on the topics may be found.

The following (non-mathematical) book is an enjoyable read and gives an idea of the important role that statistics plays in the social sciences:
Dilnot and Blastland (2008). The tiger that isn’t: seeing through a world of numbers.

Weekly homework exercises (30%); three-hour open-book examination in the ST (70%). To pass the course, homework exercises must be completed and a pass mark is required for both the homework exercises and the examination.