This page is under construction for Spring 2000. Jeanne Curran, Ph.D., Esq.
Course requires computer literacy.
This course is offered in Spring 2000 as a newly revised course designed to meet the general needs of social science students to read and interpret statistics intelligently. We believe that the general reader should be familiar enough with statistics to facilitate discourse on major issues. Although we strongly recommend that students interested in engaging in professional research should explore the mathematical formulae and assumptions which underlie general presentations of statistics in journals and texts, we believe that focus on purely mathematical concerns is foolish at such an introductory level. Thus, we have chosen to focus on interpretation in this first course, interpretation that will open the reasoning of statistical description and inference to normal public discourse. The newest version of the Dowdall, Logio, Babbie, and Hally Adventures in Criminal Justice Research provides an excellent immersion into academic discourse on statistics, without the manipulation of algebraic formulae which tend to confuse those for whom math seems like a nightmare.