88016 - Statistics (A-L)

Learning outcomes

Understanding statistics is essential to understand research in the social and behavioral sciences. In this course you will learn the basics of statistics both in Descriptive and Inferential field.

The student must obtain the basic ability of carrying out quantitative Statistical analyzes, in calculate and evaluate them. 

Course contents

The courses splits in three parts:

• In the first part of the course we will discuss methods of descriptive statistics. You will learn what cases and variables are and how you can compute measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) and dispersion (standard deviation and variance). We will also see index (statistics).

• In the next part, we discuss how to assess relationships between variables, and we introduce the concepts of correlation and regression, indeces of indipendence between categorial variabiles.

• The third part of the course is concerned with the basics of probability: calculating probabilities, probability distributions  (discrete distributions: Uniform, Bernoulli, Binomial) and countinuos distributions (Standard Normal distribution), and sampling distributions. You need to know about these things in order to understand how inferential statistics work. The latest part of the course consists of an introduction to methods of inferential statistics - methods that help us decide whether the patterns we see in our data are strong enough to draw conclusions about the underlying population we are interested in. We will discuss confidence intervals and significance tests.

Readings/Bibliography

LUISA STRACQUALURSI, Elementi di Statistica, self publishing amazon, 2019.

LUISA STRACQUALURSI, Test di Statistica a risposta multipla, 2nd edizione, self publishing amazon, 2020, ebook o cartaceo.

SIMONE BORRA e AGOSTINO DI CIACCIO, Statistica, metodologia per le scienze economiche e sociali, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 2004.

Note: the course is in Italian language, so the reference texts are in italian too. It is not binding to use these books for the understanding of the course and they are reported only as an indication and for futher in-dept information.

Teaching methods

- 50 hours remotely on MS TEAMS. The possibility of classroom lessons will be communicated later on the basis of the health conditions.

- 12 hours of further tutorials exercises

- 3 partial exams during the course

All teaching material will be available in advance on VIRTUALE platform

Assessment methods

There are 3 tests during the Statistics course, otherwise, is possible to do only one full test in the ordinary examination session.

To pass the exam the student score has to be not less then 18/30 in the full examination and in average partial tests.

Please, see the detailed exam regulations on VIRTUALE platform

Teaching tools

Slides, notes and exercises and multiple choice tests available on the VIRTUALE platform

Office hours

See the website of Luisa Stracqualursi