Statistics for the Social Sciences

Hi all, and welcome to the final episode of material for our statistics course! In this episode, we tackle the last of our parametric inferential tests: linear regression. Regression is about fitting a line to our data , which is a lot like doing algebra... but don't let that scare you away! When we use SPSS, the process is quite simple: the software takes our data, figures out the line that minim...

Hello folks, and welcome to one of our last stats episodes with new material! In this episode, we're going to discuss and learn about ANOVA , which is short for analysis of variance . We will use the ANOVA tests in SPSS when we are comparing more than two groups . In short, what this test allows us to do is separate out parts of our sample on factors that we think affect our dependent variable......

Hey all, welcome to our Week 12 episode on t-tests ! We've only got a few short weeks left of this course... and we're building upon last week by moving from inferential tests comparing a sample and a population to t-tests, which compare 2 sample groups or 1 sample group at 2 different times. For 2 totally separate groups with no overlap, we will be doing an independent samples t-test ; for a sing...

Hi all, and welcome to the first podcast episode focused on conducting inferential testing ! Today's episode is going to spend about the first 30 minutes reviewing our hypothesis testing steps . Yes, it's a lot of covering what we already did in the last episode, but I think this is one of those areas of statistics that really benefits from additional review. After reviewing concepts like signific...

Hello all--this episode is a short 10-minute instructional guide for the Initial Draft of your paper. This episode walks through the 4 sections you need in this paper with some explanation of what I'll be looking for and what you need to include in each section. I'll keep the description short since the episode just 10 minutes, but if you need any further guidance from me don't hesitate to reach o...

Howdy folks, and welcome to part 2 of our discussion for Week 10 on Significance and Hypothesis Testing! This episode is all about that hypothesis testing component, particularly the errors we can run into ( Type 1 or Type 2, aka false positives and false negatives ) and the steps for testing we must take with our hypotheses. I will say this episode is dense--we've got a lot of major concepts (lik...

Hey all, and welcome back to our discussions on Statistics for the Social Sciences! Today's episode (and the next one) are two of the most critical for this class--I've called Week 10 the Heart of this Course for a reason! In this episode, we will start with a review of probability and the normal curve . It's been a bit since we talked about that material so a short review is hopefully helpful. Bu...

Howdy folks, and welcome to the last episode before the Midterm ! I know, you're all very excited for that... but pump the brakes because before we get there we need to finish our discussion of probability and the normal curve . In this episode, we review our learning about those topics and connect it to the use of z-scores , which are a way of telling us how different a specific value is from the...

Hiya folks, and welcome to one of our final podcast episodes before the Midterm Exam ! In this episode, we are going to focus on 3 key points: (1) language that we use when describing samples versus populations ( estimates and parameters ); (2) a discussion and review of the basics of probability ; and (3) connecting probability and the normal curve . There's a lot of conceptual leaps at times wit...

Hello again everyone, and welcome to our Week 6 episode on research and statistics ! In this episode, we will walk through the research process broken down here into 7 steps: creating the question, completing a literature review, designing our study, specifying our measurements of variables (as well as our hypotheses ), collecting our data, analyzing that data, and finally offering an interpretati...

Hi everybody, and welcome to our week 5 discussion of data quality ! In this episode, we've really only got two major concepts to understand: reliability (aka consistency ) and validity (aka accuracy ). Of course, there are different ways to figure out our reliability ( test-retest, interrater reliability , etc.) and validity ( content, criterion, and construct ) and we can certainly use SPSS to a...

Hi all, and welcome to a one-off episode on statistics terms ! This episode is not part of our normal progression through the course but I did want to provide more discussion and explanation of terms you'd noted as difficult to understand. The episode starts with central tendency (including arithmetic mean and percentile ranks ), then moves to variance (including exclusive range, inclusive range,...

Hey there all, and welcome back for Episode 6 on correlation ! For this week and episode, we're going to cover a few initial concepts that need to be more directly discussed: variables (including independent and dependent variables ) and then the levels of measurement ( nominal , ordinal , interval , and ratio ). Next, we'll get into the definition and looks of correlation (as they would appear on...

Howdy ho everyone! Welcome to our Week 3 episode on data visualization ! In this episode, we will talk all things graphing -related: which graphs are best for showing raw data ( histograms ), showing change over time ( line graphs are great at this), providing comparisons ( bar or area charts ), and more. In addition, I've included a link to a video on how graphs can be used to misrepresent data o...

Hello stats course members, and welcome to episode #4! In this episode, we spend a little over 20 minutes talking about different measures of variation or the measures we can use to understand how different the values in our dataset are from one another. The statistical measures we use for understanding variation include the range , standard deviation , and variance . We will go over the definitio...

Howdy all, and welcome back! In this episode, we begin our discussion and learning about measures of central tendency which are part of what we would consider to be descriptive statistics . We are specifically focusing on the mean , median , and mode . This episode will walk through the definition of each measure, an explanation of how we calculate them, and then some practice exercise using Excel...

Hi all, and welcome to the second episode of our podcast on Statistics for the Social Sciences! In this episode, we're going to take a little bit of time to further discuss/investigate the syllabus but the majority of this podcast is going to focus on defining some key terms: descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, sample, and population . We'll also spend some time walking through the bas...

Hello everyone and welcome to our podcast on Statistics for the Social Sciences! In this first episode, we will get an introduction to this course and in particular to the course Canvas site. Some of the most critical tools you will need to navigate this class are the Weekly Roadmap pages which are discussed early on. We will spend about 15-20 minutes on that as well as the other parts of the Canv...