Fundamentals of Statistics

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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 23rd 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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Course Outline

The approach will be largely non-mathematical, concentrating on concepts rather than mathematical theory. The first part of the course is an introduction to descriptive statistics for univariate and bivariate data, covering topics such as frequency tables, histograms and stemplots, the median, IQR & boxplots, the mean & standard deviation, levels of measurement, scatterplots, Pearson's r, introduction to regression, relationships in tabulated data, correlation and causality.

 

The second part of the course deals with the ideas of inferential statistics.  Topics covered include a basic discussion of experimental design and sampling procedures, followed by the normal distribution, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing and confidence interval for the proportion, hypothesis test for the correlation coefficient, t-tests for paired and independent data and also the one sample t-test, including effect size statistics for the t tests, the chi-squared test, and confidence intervals for the mean. The statistical package SPSS will be used where appropriate as a teaching tool and computational aid (previous experience is not assumed). Students will be able to gain competency in using SPSS to obtain all the graphs and statistics covered in the course.

 

The overall focus of the course is for students to obtain a solid foundation of basic statistical concepts and procedures in order for students to then progress with some confidence into more advanced topics.

 
Level 1 - runs over 5 days
Instructor: 

Imma Guarnieri [BSc, Grad DipEd, Grad Dip Applied Science (Social Statistics), Masters of Biostatistics] is a sessional lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology and in Medical Education at the University of Melbourne. She has been involved in teaching Statistics to postgraduate students for the past 20 years.

Course dates: Monday 2 February 2015 - Friday 6 February 2015
Course status: Course completed (no new applicants)
Week: 
Week 2
Recommended Background: 

None; nor is previous computing experience necessary.

Recommended Texts: 

The instructor's bound, book length course notes will serve as the course text. The notes contain detailed explanations and examples of all the statistical concepts covered along with instructions of how to obtain the various graphs and statistics from Stata.

Course fees
Member: 
$1,800
Non Member: 
$3,230
Full time student Member: 
$1,800
Program: 
Summer Program 2015
Notes: 

Participants will receive a copy of the course notes on the first day.