PUBPOL 2101 - Statistics for Public Policy

(MQR-HE)

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Forbidden Overlap: due to an overlap in content, students will receive credit for only one course in the following group: AEM 2100, BTRY 3010, BTRY 6010, ENGRD 2700, HADM 2010, ILRST 2100, ILRST 6100, MATH 1710, PUBPOL 2100, PUBPOL 2101, PSYCH 2500, SOC 3010, STSCI 2100, STSCI 2150, STSCI 2200.

Enrollment limited to: Public Policy and Health Care Policy majors.

Staff.

“Introduction to Statistics for Public Policy” introduces basic statistical techniques used by researchers to investigate social, economic, and political phenomena. Topics include data presentation and descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency and dispersion, random variables and their probability distributions, joint and conditional distributions, expected value, conditional expectation, statistical sampling and inference, interval estimation and confidence intervals, hypothesis testing using t and F distributions, correlation, bivariate regression analysis, and statistical elaboration. A lab accompanies the course lectures. In problem sets and exams, students calculate statistics by hand to develop familiarity with data analysis. They also learn and apply basic commands using Stata statistical software.

Outcome 1: Employ basic numeric and visualization tools to describe data.

Outcome 2: Apply inferential statistical analysis to policy-relevant research questions.

Outcome 3: Conduct statistical evaluations of US census data in computing environment.

Outcome 4: Critique methodological approaches to social scientific research.