Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

General Information

Course Code	S_DIS
Credits	6 EC
Period	P4
Course Level	100
Language of Tuition	English
Faculty	Faculty of Social Sciences
Course Coordinator	dr. M.F.J. van der Horst
Examiner	dr. M.F.J. van der Horst
Teaching Staff	prof. dr. P.W.C. Koning dr. M.F.J. van der Horst dr. J.C. Muis dr. M. Garnier Villarreal
Part of programme(s) Bachelor Communication Science Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Political Science Use the arrow keys to navigate the list, Enter to select, and Escape to close.

Practical Information

You need to register for this course yourself. The (de)registration deadlines can be found on VU.nl

Teaching Methods	Practical*, Written partial exam, Lecture

*You cannot select a group yourself for this teaching method, you will be placed in a group.

Check the schedule for this course.

Course Objective

Goal:
This course aims to teach necessary basics of descriptive and
inferential statistics to 1st year undergraduate students of various
social science programs of the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS).

Learning outcomes:

Knowledge and understanding - The student has acquired knowledge and
understanding of:
(1) elementary methods and techniques of descriptive and inferential
statistics.

Application - The student has acquired the competences to:
(2) use the appropriate descriptive statistics given the available data;
(3) apply several elaboration models;
(4) use statistical techniques to test the difference between two groups
(i.c. t-test);
(5) use statistical techniques to test the association between variables
(i.c. correlation coefficient and regression analysis);
(6) Apply the mentioned tests in SPSS or R using available data;
(7) create a table with relevant statistical information and how to
‘read’ such tables.

Course Content

This course provides an introduction to the statistical methods of
social science research. Students develop skills to describe collected
quantitative data (descriptive statistics) and to test hypotheses about
variation between and within groups for statistical generalizability
(inferential statistics). Topics covered in this course include:
univariate and bivariate statistics (central tendency, dispersion,
association, and correlation), preparation and 'reading' of tables of
relationships between variables, sampling distributions, hypothesis
testing and calculation of confidence intervals, simple and multiple
regression, and reliability analysis.

Additional Information Teaching Methods

Lectures and practical tutorials

Method of Assessment

Midterms and final exam.

Literature

To be announced (on Canvas)

Additional Information Target Audience

1st year bachelorstudents in Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology, Political Science (English track) and Communication Science
(English Track).

Custom Course Registration

In this course, you cannot enroll for one of the study groups yourself,
but you will be assigned by the course coordinator. The allocation will
be announced via Canvas. Please note: You do have to register for the
course and the other course components on VU.nl.