This draws its inspiration and approach from the reductionist models used in the so-called hard sciences and sticks with that despite accumulating evidence and approaches within these sciences themselves that the phenomena under investigation are systemic. The non systemic approach takes its base from Fisher s statistics of regression etc which were developed specifically for strictly controlled experiments. These statistics have never been able to develop forms of systemic, or cluster analysis with more than a handful of variables. Many have responded to aspects of the challenge and there are indeed now a raft of proven approaches which taken together provide a comprehensive base for reliable systemic data collection and analysis. This course provides a comprehensive and hands on introduction to the systemic approach.
Every segment has examples attached which are worked through during the course.
This is a definite prerequisite. If you do not have a working knowledge of descriptive and correlation based statistics, please do a basic course in statistics for the social sciences before you enrol. The fundamentals of adequate Questionnaire design are simple and constantly ignored. The result is frequently data which is either misleading or uninterpretable in any rigorous sense. When the demand is for data applicable to systemic multivariate analysis, the demands on data collection are radically increased.