84149 - Statistics for Social Sciences

Learning outcomes

This course aims to provide basic statistical techniques for investigating socio-economic phenomena, with specific attention to the tourism domain. Particular emphasis is addressed to the descriptive and inferential techniques for data analysis also in a multidimensional context. At the end of this course, the student will be able to i) collect and organize tourism data; ii) arrange a sample survey and build a questionnaire for his/her own research purposes; iii) perform statistical analysis in the tourism field.

Course contents

• Part 1: Statistical inference

  Sample and population; sampling distribution of the mean; hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. LAB: R tutorial on data visualization, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals.

• Part 2: Regression

  Simple linear regression; multiple linear regression; least squares estimation; inference for the model coefficient; model checking; anova; extension of linear regression. LAB: R tutorial on linear regression with real case studies.

• Part 3: Classification

  Logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis, some notions on generalized linear models. LAB: R tutorial on classification techniques applied to real case studies.

Readings/Bibliography

• Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences, Global Edition, 5/E. Agresti (2017).
• An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R. James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani (2013).

Teaching methods

Frontal lectures using slides, notes at the board/ipad. Laptop when using R for the applied tutorials.

Assessment methods

The exam aims at evaluating students' understanding of the all topics included in the syllabus; it will be evaluated the ability to:

- produce statistical analysis (e.g. descriptive statistics, tests and model fitting);

- interpret the output of the analysis (including the output produced by the software R).

Exam is a quiz on EOL/Zoom. There will be questions on all the topics included in the syllabus; some questions are multiple choice while others require to enter a number (the use of software R is required to answer the questions requiring a number).

Teaching tools

Software: R (http://www.r-project.org/) e RStudio (https://rstudio.com/).

Office hours

See the website of Massimo Ventrucci