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From the course by University of Amsterdam

Basic Statistics

1988 ratings

University of Amsterdam

Basic Statistics

1988 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Methods and Statistics in Social Sciences

Understanding statistics is essential to understand research in the social and behavioral sciences. In this course you will learn the basics of statistics; not just how to calculate them, but also how to evaluate them. This course will also prepare you for the next course in the specialization - the course Inferential Statistics. 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). Next, we discuss how to assess relationships between variables, and we introduce the concepts correlation and regression. The second part of the course is concerned with the basics of probability: calculating probabilities, probability distributions and sampling distributions. You need to know about these things in order to understand how inferential statistics work. The third 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. You will not only learn about all these statistical concepts, you will also be trained to calculate and generate these statistics yourself using freely available statistical software.

From the lesson

Before we get started...

In this module we'll consider the basics of statistics. But before we start, we'll give you a broad sense of what the course is about and how it's organized. Are you new to Coursera or still deciding whether this is the course for you? Then make sure to check out the 'Course introduction' and 'What to expect from this course' sections below, so you'll have the essential information you need to decide and to do well in this course! If you have any questions about the course format, deadlines or grading, you'll probably find the answers here. Are you a Coursera veteran and ready to get started? Then you might want to skip ahead to the first course topic: 'Exploring data'. You can always check the general information later. Veterans and newbies alike: Don't forget to introduce yourself in the 'meet and greet' forum!

Welcome to Basic Statistics!3:33

Meet the Instructors

Matthijs Rooduijn
Dr.
Department of Political Science
Emiel van Loon
Assistant Professor
Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics

Hi everybody, welcome to this course on basic statistics.

>> Stop, don't turn away.

There's no need to be afraid or feel intimidated.

At first sight the word statistic might look pretty scary.

>> But we'll show you that in reality, statistics is not scary at all.

We'll talk about fun things only.

Like playing football, scuba diving, eating chocolate.

And we'll also discuss hipsters, taxi drivers, babies, and beach holidays.

In fact, one of our main goals is to convince you that statistics can

actually be fun.

>> In this course we'll guide you through the basis of statistics

by means of video lectures, short written text, quizzes and an exam.

We believe that the basic understanding of statistics is important for

at least three reasons.

First, there's a lot of statistics around us, in the news and

especially in scientific work.

This course will help you to make sense of what's being presented

regardless whether if it concerns sports, politics, medicine, etc.

Second, knowledge of statistics will help you conduct your own study.

How should you analyze the information you get?

Which method should you employ?

Third and finally, analyzing the data to learn about the world around us is fun.

Hopefully you'll agree after this course.

>> We'll make a distinction between two types of statistics, descriptive and

inferential statistics.

When we talk about descriptive statistics we mean methods of summarizing

the information we have collected for an analysis.

We can summarize information by means of graphs.

Such as a pie chart or a bar graph or numbers such as a mean,

percentage, or correlation coefficient.

Inferential statistics is about drawing conclusions about a population

on the basis of only a limited number of cases.

An example is saying something about all citizens of France

on the basis of a sample of relatively few French citizens.

>> In total, there are seven modules in this course.

Descriptive statistics will the topic of the first two modules.

In the next three modules, we'll introduce the means that will later help us to

employ methods of inferential statistics.

We'll talk about probability, probability distributions, and sampling distributions.

And in the final two modules,

we'll introduce methods of inferential statistics.

Specifically how to estimate the confidence interval and

how to conduct the hypothesis test.

>> We will describe all details about scheduling of lectures and

quizzes in the course pages.

But before we go into further detail, let us briefly introduce ourselves.

This is Emiel Van Loon.

He teaches statistics and computational methods and researches the movement and

distribution of animals in the natural environment.

He loves running in the woods and he's quite fond of his vegetable garden.

>> And this is Matthijs Rooduijn.

He works as political scientist and teaches statistical methods.

His research is about voting behavior and as you will find out during the course,

he recently became a father and he likes scuba diving.

>> Of course we did not make this course all by ourselves.

We are very grateful to Annemarie Zand Scholten who helped us a lot during

the development of the program.

And the nice drawings you see here are made by Marie-Anne van Stam.

Without her, the video lectures wouldn't be so lively and colorful.

>> Last but not least, we would like to thank Auke Hamers and

Antoine Ruedisueli acting jointly as cameraman, sound technicians and

editors, they've manage to turn all of the separate parts into a beautiful unity.

That's it.

We hope you'll enjoy the course.

>> Have fun.

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