Applied Statistical Procedures

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Note re laptops:

A laptop is required for this course. We recommend that course participants bring their own Windows machine however Apple and Linux machines are also OK, as long as the user is very confident with it.  

The laptop will need to have SPSS installed. Most university staff and students will have access to SPSS through their institution, however it is extremely important that you check that your license works when you are not on campus at your university, as sometimes the settings/license require access to your university's VPN. If SPSS works on your laptop when you are at home then you should have nothing to worry about. Otherwise you may need to contact your relevant IT department. Wireless Internet will be available during the course.

If you do not have SPSS on your laptop, a 14-day free trial version is available via the IBM website (obviously this would need to be downloaded no sooner than 30th Jan in order to last for the duration of the course).   

We also strongly recommend that participants bring a mouse and, if they have one, a laptop lock although we will have some spare locks. 

All course participants are asked to please email info@acspri.org.au by 27/1/2015 at the latest to confirm they have access to a laptop for the course and will be able to access SPSS; or alternatively make contact by this date to request help. 

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This is an intermediate level course between ‘Fundamentals of Statistics’, and the more detailed single procedure based courses covering topics such as SEM, Multiple Regression, and Factor Analysis.  This course will cover a range of the most commonly used statistical procedures, and it aims to provide participants with an ability to understand, run and interpret these procedures.  This course will further enhance the participant’s ability to understand research based literature where these procedures were employed.
 

The procedures that will be covered will include the following:
• The frequency based statistics of Chi Square Goodness of Fit and Chi Square Test of Association.
• The Parametric test of difference statistics of T-tests, ANOVA, ANCOVA, MANOVA, and MANCOVA. Factorial analysis with multiple independent variables will also be covered along with Repeated Measures ANOVA.
• The Non-Parametric test of difference statistics of Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon, Friedmans Analysis of Variance, and Kruskal Wallis.
• The statistics to predict and to explain variance of Simple Regression, Multiple Regression, Discriminant Analysis and Multiple Discriminant Analysis.
• The data reduction technique of Factor Analysis
• Other considerations covered in this course will be
• Power, the data and statistics that are most powerful, and techniques for increasing statistical power.
• How to determine the best procedure for the demands of the research
• Data transformation to increase power and allow parametric procedures to be employed when data can be appropriated adjusted.
• The important interplay between effect size and significance.
• The integration of statistical results into reports.
 

This course is taught from an applied prospective.  On this occasion the statistical package employed will be SPSS. Students will be exposed to a variety of research scenarios and to the logic of statistical procedure selection and application.  This course will provide a good foundation for progression to the more detailed courses in (Multiple) Regression, Factor Analysis, SEM and Latent Variables using Mplus.  Students completing this course should be able to select the appropriate statistical procedure, run the procedure, and report the results from an informed base of understanding.