Fundamentals of Criminological Research

3 Credits

Designed to help criminology students understand and apply three important components of statistics: decriptive statistics (including probability theory), fundamentals of statistical inference, and regression analysis. Course assumes familiarity with basic descriptive statistics. The emphasis of the classes on descriptive statistics is the calculation and interpretation of summary statistical measures for describing raw data. Covers the basic rules of probability and different probabilistic processes that could describe criminal activity. The sessions on fundamentals of statistical inferences are designed to provide background for executing and interpreting hypothesis tests and confidence intervals. The latter portion of the course focuses on regession analysis. Uses the statistical software, Stata.