This course is also being offered in Week 3 in Perth (see list of courses) using SPSS for examples. For this Week 1 course in Sydney, Stata will mainly be used for examples. This course will take place in a computer lab with Stata v12 installed.
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 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.
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.
None; nor is previous computing experience necessary.
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.
Participants will receive a copy of the course notes on the first day.
Stata is a registered trademark of StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA, and the Stata logo is used with the permission of StataCorp