Statistics for Public Policy

4.0 credits · Undergraduate

Statistics for Public Policy introduces basic statistical techniques used by researchers to investigate social, economic, and political phenomena. Topics include data presentation and descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency and dispersion, random variables and their probability distributions, joint and conditional distributions, expected value, conditional expectation, statistical sampling and inference, interval estimation and confidence intervals, hypothesis testing using t distributions, correlation, and bivariate regression analysis. A mandatory review section accompanies the course lectures. In problem sets and exams, students calculate statistics by hand to develop familiarity with data analysis. They also learn and apply basic commands using Stata statistical software.